Well HI there! I was sick, y’all! Got me a case of the swiney hiney! How do I know for sure? Well I don’t, exactly. Something hit me like a ton of bricks Wednesday night and I’m still sort of climbing out from under the rubble. The flu part was bad enough, with the aches and pains, and the walrus-like barking, but whenever I run a fever, I get this kind of neuralgia – it’s a sharp, repeated pain like someone is taking a ball peen hammer or an ice pick to the back of my head, just below my ear. Honestly, it’s just no fun whatsoever. The last time I had it, my doctor suggested combining Tylenol with Advil and throwing in some Atavan just for good measure, so I spent the last few days stumbling around in a Lindsay Lohan fugue state. It didn’t help that Aidan brought home Call of Duty 2. It’s hard to nurse yourself back to health when your kids are storming Kabul with M16’s.
Things had pretty much reached a nadir of crappiness on Saturday when John called me to Aidan’s room, where, lo and behold, the ceiling was leaking. A stalagmite (stalactite? Who the hell knows?) of paint with water dripping from the end appeared suspended from the ceiling, directly under my bathroom. John poked at it with a drywall saw like some freakish piñata, and was rewarded with a deluge of water and plaster. Ole! We called the insurance company, and they sent emergency contractors, who cut a giant hole in the ceiling, exposing the plumbing, the wiring and the ancient lathe, and they coated everything in plastic and set up massive commercial dehumidifiers, and we are sitting tight until the regular contractors get here and determine just WTF is going on. In the mean time, the dehumidifiers are doing just that, sucking whatever moisture there is not only out of the house, but also out of one’s mucous membranes, causing one’s lips to blister, one’s eyeballs to shrivel, and one’s laugh lines to deepen even though one is not laughing. No. One is still hacking up pieces of one’s broken lung.
Aidan had the nerve to say to me at one point “You’re a little bit moany, aren’t you?” Ah, they’re so brave when they’re holding (virtual) semi automatic weapons.