Salamander
Fire Walking

I have spent the past month or so re-reading all my entries from beginning to current. Odd, the tricks memory plays. I remembered events, but certain details needed to be prodded back into active RAM, and other events must have been completely vaporized from whatever serves as The Cloud to My Brain by random solar flare activity. Chronology as remembered was a confused and convoluted thing and I had to stop more than once to relearn the correct sorting of things my brain had disordered. There were areas so poorly written with such egregious spelling errors and cringe-worthy syntax that I was tempted to find out if the delete button still worked (no, my small but faithful following, I did not disturb so much as a hair on this diary’s head). And there were a few entries that still have me confused as to who exactly wrote them; I could not possibly have ever written anything so amazing.

And the trolls. Mon Dieu, the trolls. So many private comments made only with the intention to hurt, bewilder, or provoke. I never deleted a one, never reacted to any with no known source and shouldn’t have reacted to any at all. I think, at my peak, I was up to perhaps a dozen or so private trollings a day, though I know others were receiving far more. Perhaps one of the best things this diary ever did for me was teach me how to ignore that shit. A pity I couldn’t have figured that out in high school.

As usual, I sit down thinking I’ll be writing about one topic while my fingers disengage from my brain and write about something completely different and irrelevant. But never mind, back on course, full steam ahead.

An abbreviated obligatory Christmas/New Year update, then. I’d been sick with some cold/flu/generic virus from mid-November through the end of the year, which made Christmas preparations and anticipations fairly pitiful. A few days before Christmas, I ended up volunteering to host Christmas dinner for my minimal family. I’d been following the FODMAP diet since last June at the advice of my new gastroenterologist to try to control what had become significant bowel problems, and it was easier to cook than to try and eat around what anyone else might cook.

It was the first big holiday event without Midnight and Selkie and the first big holiday with The Professor’s newest love, Evening. That meant a fair amount of tearing apart scars that hadn’t exactly healed anyway. Each cat gets its own stocking, and so as I unpacked the Christmas décor I inevitably came across Middy’s and Selkie’s Christmas stockings. Each cat gets it’s own picture ornaments for the tree, and another memorial ornament when the time comes. This was the eleventh year Clueless Wonder’s ornament was hung, the first for Selkie and Middy.
On New Year’s Eve, at way too early in the morning, The Prof and I got on a westbound flight to California to spend a week visiting his mother. In many ways she’s a more extreme version of The Prof, keeping vampire hours and obsessive about cleanliness in very specific places in the house while oblivious to it in others. Politics was not to be approached during the visit, though I hadn’t realized that she’d succumbed to the dark side until after the visit commenced.

I did get my first visit to Disneyland, complete with silver sequined mouse ears and “First Time Visitor” button, both worn proudly. We went to the Salton Sea, which I recommend to anyone who likes sinking a foot deep into a beach made of the most viscous mud I’ve ever encountered, barnacle shell fill and moldering fish carcasses. Later I discovered we’d have done better to visit the hot mud pots and geothermal mud volcanoes in the area instead. Maybe next time.

End of abbreviated Christmas/New Year update.

So now, an abbreviated Now update.

The Bosslady sent me home last Friday, after I stuck out 8 hours of my workday getting progressively sicker. I got home around 3:15, showered, dried my hair, and went to bed for 26 hours. I got up Saturday evening for about an hour, then crashed again. Sunday was pretty similar except it was spent on the sofa instead of bed. Saw the doctor Monday, who diagnosed bronchitis, which didn’t explain the vomiting and diarrhea but went a long way towards reassuring me the pain in my chest was neither pneumonia nor cardiac arrest (grin). He told me to stay out Tuesday as well, but made a mistake on my doctor’s note (yes, I need a doctor’s note if I miss two consecutive days) and wrote me out through Wednesday’s date. Today, Wednesday, was a Big Event at work for which I’d suddenly been given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. In truth, I am still sick, but could have managed work today. I can’t say I’ve never stretched an extra day out of a sick leave, but I can say I haven’t done it in quite some time. I refuse to feel guilty about this one.

I’m older, and my elementary school’s teachers were probably a bit more old school in regards to discipline, but perhaps some of you share my memories of an entire class being punished for something one person did. I’m not talking about a case of the entire class being kept from recess until Teacher finds out which student is responsible for the spitball. I’m talking more like “Little Timmy painted tanks on all the desks, you all told me it was little Timmy, but you all have to stay in during recess and clean up this mess.” Today’s Special Event has every veterinarian in our circuit coming to a correlation because several of us independently reported on the incompetencies of one of our compatriots. We knew he was screwing up, each one of us reported it when we observed it (and a few brave souls tried to correct him, only to get a scholarly lecture on why he was right and we were wrong, until he’d get a funny look on his face and shut up mid-sentence), and yet now all of us have to basically go back to school because of this numbskull. Well, all of us except for me. I’m playing hooky with a doctor’s note.