Five For Friday

 Really just Friday randoms (un)cleverly disguised. 

1. Tiresome health stuff: yesterday was exactly three weeks in and I THINK I have managed to mostly quell the cough without having to go to the doctor. I looked it up and realized I was over-using my blue inhaler, so started using it once in the morning, once at night and two other times spaced out during the day. Instead of getting off the cold meds as soon as I felt I could, I took some morning and night for a solid week. I stopped the narcotic cough syrup two nights ago and have still slept pretty well. The only thing I hate is that if I start coughing in the night, the only thing that stops it is having a Strepsil lozenge even while I sleep. Assuming I don't choke to death, I cringe at what this is probably doing to my teeth, but I can't really see a good alternative. This seems to have forestalled the cough getting as bad as it did in January, when I regularly coughed until I threw up or nearly displaced a rib. My mom did ask if I thought I might have whooping cough, since she heard it's going around (thanks anti-vaxxers), and my dad scorned this theory since this is the same cough my sister and I have had since we were five years old. So many memories of my dad sitting on the side of my bed in the middle of the night dispensing cough syrup.

2. Eve is loving being in the lab for the most part. She has her own little bench and her own little experiment (I keep forgetting what it is exactly, but I know it has something to do with seeing which bacteriophage can do something faster, so I refer to it as Racing Phages). She has a really nice PhD student as a mentor, and things are going well aside from her agar being a little lumpy. It would be awesome if she could do her grad work here, but the prof is going on sabbatical next year - sometimes I feel like she gets the reverse of all the lucky breaks that fall to Angus, because this spectacularly bad timing is something that has happened more than once for her. She's going to talk to him and see if he can recommend another lab with a similar culture (hee hee). 

3. I didn't sleep much Tuesday night, and went into my Wednesday morning school feeling like I could literally not hold my eyelids up. Then my first class - which had missed their official first day the week before - was so lovely and sweet and polite it actually made me tear up a bit. They all said thank-you. Some of them talked about their books excitedly. One girl said she liked my skirt. Last year my first class at Monday School was the same - so quiet and nice, and their teacher was so calm and nice with them. 

4. The left side of my neck has been an issue for over a year now. I started physio again two weeks ago, and since then some kind of nerve pinch is causing pain in my right arm now too - moving in the WRONG DIRECTION, body. When we were at camp one of the boys pulled a leg muscle and I gave him a can of Deep Relief spray from my first aid kit. He used most of it and found it really helpful, and his mom (my friend) replaced it for me with Extra Strength. Y'all, this is NOT AN OVERSTATEMENT.  I've been using it every night, which is helpful now that I've figured out that I need to be sparing, and spray in one location and then quickly walk away, otherwise it's like simultaneously pepper spraying myself and giving myself chemical burns. So much coughing and sneezing and crying and burning. I am a constant danger to myself.

5. I hosted book club last night, because the originally planned host just moved. We are finally tackling Don Quixote - book one this month, book two next. I sometimes try to theme the food, although most of the menu last night veered Mexican rather than Spanish. I did have Manchego, a Spanish sheep's milk cheese, and Manchego popovers, in addition to black bean empanadas - wait wait, I just looked it up and according to Mr. Internet empanadas (which I have just become entirely unable to type coherently) are actually Spanish in origin, so never mind - and guacamole with chips. Coincidentally, I just got a FB memory that in 2013 I hosted book club on the same day for Under the Volcano, which takes place in Mexico - "I just squeezed lime and sprinkled cilantro over a variety of foodstuffs, I should be good, right?" 

These always make me wonder why I don't make popovers every freaking day

Lucy riveted by the DQ discussion.