November, November, November. I will not call it a cursed month, but it was definitely not my favorite month this year. While the month fooled me by starting off so well with the haunted house, it quickly went downhill. Two days after enjoying entertainment fear, my heart was stopped and broken. My dear sweet Guinness, who I adopted from a rescue group when he was barely eight weeks old, suffered two seizures on November 5th. It was absolutely terrifying for me, thankfully I don’t believe he realized what had happened to him he was so disoriented. The emergency vet was wonderful and let me reach the conclusion she already knew had to happen in my own pace. After 14 years, it was time for my puppy to leave me. I had known this would probably be his last winter but the suddenness of the seizures had forced the issue into now and I was not emotionally prepared for what happened. Fortunately, my work understood and I was able to spend the next day mourning.
Guinness was an amazing dog who insisted upon following his people anywhere we went. If we didn’t help him find a way to be with person going off on an adventure, he would bark and yip until we did. That part must have been the chihuahua in him. He is survived by four cats, only two of whom I think liked.
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The following Tuesday, the cold weather decided to weigh in on our yard decor. A fountain was deemed an essential addition to improve the appearance of our front yard and was installed by breaking the water pipe leading to the outside faucet. While I agree a fountain would add a certain ambiance, this was not the method I wanted to install one by. At least shutting it off before too much damage occurred was easy. The evening brought a different type of excitement, both bad and good. The dishwasher we had ordered at the end of September in stainless black had arrived. Mind you, it had arrived once before in white and had been unloaded and opened at our house before we realized the mistake. When my husband told me he was picking it up, I told him he needed to verify the color before bringing it home, something he had already determined to do, great minds think alike. Our old dishwasher had completely stopped working but we didn’t want the gaping hole in cabinetry while waiting for it’s replacement, so a drying rack it had become.
Tuesday evening my husband zipped out to pick up the new (and hopefully correct) dishwasher. Dave and the salespeople all agreed it was the right shade of black so home it came. The problem with using the former dishwasher to dry dishes is that water builds up in the drain pipe and the bottom of it in general. Dave unhooked the dishwater, turned it on its side and out pours a flood of water. We clean up the mess, pick up the dishwasher and begin to head to the garage. Two small steps in, I comment about the water still draining onto my feet. Taking the step down onto the landing which leads to the garage and my feet slipped out from under me. Down went the dishwasher. On my hand, on my foot but mostly across my thigh. Oh the pain. My hand and foot were fine but my thigh, the searing pain was terrible. My loving husband, who over stresses anytime I’m injured, tried to lighten the mood by telling me for someone who didn’t have a broken bone I was incredibly loud in my complaining. I responded by giving him the look of death.
Dave finished removing the old dishwasher, installed the new one, took off the frosted plastic cover from the front and lo and behold, the dishwasher was indeed black…it just wasn’t black stainless, it was glossy black. Son of a bad word. Dave was immediately on the phone to the company. It wasn’t much of a conciliation but we were able to keep the incorrect dishwasher until they got their act together and sent us the right machine.
Thanksgiving was a fun, relaxing, long weekend spent with family. The eldest daughter had been flown in for the weekend from attending college in Colorado to spend the holiday with her fiance and his two little girls who live about an hour south of us. Normally they come up on Saturday for the family Thanksgiving but a bad case of the crud hit every member of her family, keeping them at home. This was the first Thanksgiving in quite awhile the two of us haven’t spent together which was the only sad aspect of an otherwise enjoyable holiday weekend.
With my daughter headed back to Colorado on Tuesday, I opted to work from her house that day so I could spend some time with her before she left. I don’t know if it was the leftover illness lingering in her place or being around the 20 plus kids on Saturday but not long after I was there I began to feel sick. I could feel a fever take hold and the general yuckiness of coming down with something. It didn’t matter though, I was grateful for the time with my not so little girl. Wednesday morning I woke with a 101.3 fever. Nothing I did brought it below a 100.8 while reaching a high of 102. It’s okay, I’m usually a sick for 24 hours kind of person, this would pass. And it did. Sometime during the night, my fever broke…replacing itself with a chest rattling cough. I have a perpetual cough that gets better or worse depending on air quality and temperature so I’m used to hacking even if it is uncomfortable. This mess though, this was the long, drawn out, way too loud death rattle that if I had worked in an office, would have been sent home. Again, nothing worked to lessen it so by the end of the day my chest was killing me. I did discover in our medicine drawer a bottle of generic mucinex night time blue liquid which I figured couldn’t be any less effective than anything else I had tried. I am now referring to this bottle as liquid gold coma medicine. I feel asleep and didn’t cough or wake up until 3 am when my body decided it needed to cough but couldn’t due to sleep paralysis. It took me about 20 minutes to wake up enough to move, cough and take some more liquid gold, then bam…out until Dave woke up for work. Naturally I was still sluggish but at least my chest had had a chance to recover a bit.
As I sat and tried to work, something I had not been able to do much of over the past three days, I questioned what fresh hell awaited me today in the way of crud symptoms. I was wore out from being sick for three days and really just wanted to be done at this point but being done was not my fate. Friday sent me the queasy stomach trouble so I was either in the bathroom or wanting to be in the bathroom all day. Sigh. What a way to end a rather lackluster month. It’s Sunday now, the second day of December. I’m still not feeling great but definitely improved, I even made it to my favorite winter faire yesterday. The correct dishwasher also arrived yesterday, and it looks great, so I’m optimistic December will be better than November was.
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