NOW what?

Honest to God, this has been the single worst year of my life when it comes to endless minor miseries. Every time it looks like I’m just about to get over some ailment something else comes along to take its place. Literally, I’ve been sick since a year ago this fall.

The back and the foot still hurt, although on some days that interminable complaint is slightly better. Now, though, I’ve developed a real bellyache to bellyache about. Don’t know what it is — some kind of enteritis — but my GAWD it hurts!

Nor do I know where it came from, but I’ve got a suspicion.

Saturday friends and I had a grand old time. My pal KJG drove in from her house on the far, far, far west side of the Valley so we could go to the annual chicken coop tour.

Yes. Raising backyard chickens has become such a craze in these parts that chicken fanciers open their yards and coops to tours of fellow and would-be fanciers. So that’s amusing, to see what things people get up to. We went to an urban yuppie restaurant we enjoyed, where I ordered a sandwich billed as “goat cheese and cranberry.” It actually was more like an arugula sandwich with a little cheese and some sort of sauce.

I’m allergic to arugula, and this thing was just stuffed with it. Well, KJG was buying, so it seemed rude to grump that I couldn’t eat it or to send it back and make us wait around another 20 minutes or more for something else to come out of the kitchen. Besides, I was so hungry I just had to eat.

To my surprise, that sat fairly well, at least for the nonce.

Then it was off to dinner and then chamber music with another friend. We went by a kind of bistro for dinner, where I ordered a dish of glorified macaroni and cheese. It was very good, and nice and hot on a chilly rainy night.

By the time we got out of there, a major gas attack was coming on. That’s weird, because there was nothing exotic about the mac and cheese. And it was so hot that no microbes could have survived the trip to the table. So unless a glass was unclean, I’m thinking the bistro likely was not the source of whatever’s ailing me today. It probably was the arugula sandwich. Especially since cranberries were still coming out whilst I was spending the night on the john.

Last night I had the worst intestinal cramps I’ve ever had, and during the vast number of decades I’ve spent on this earth, I’ve enjoyed a few doozies. Entertained a trip to the ER, but I just can’t contemplate the prospect of spending still more hours and hours sitting around an ER with needles stuck in my arms, probably to little avail. So passed the night crawling between the bed and the terlet. Missed choir both on Sunday morning and for the beautiful evensong performance, to my distress.

The minute my fave client got back in town from her world-wide  junkets last week, she forked over a new book by one of our most difficult authors (I call him The Emperor of Bad Capitalization) and said she wanted it back in a week. Fortunately other work is slow just now, so there’s time to tackle a rush job. But today I’ll need to spend the entire day finishing that thing. Plus the online students are sending in a new raft of off-key copy for me to read.

So once again, the house won’t get cleaned. But that’s OK, because I’m in no shape to clean house, anyway. As soon as the dog is fed, I’m taking the Emperor’s book back to bed.

{moan}