Friday Randoms - Coughing and Cleaning

1. I'm still kind of sick. By which I mean I go stretches of a few hours when I feel almost normal, and then I erupt into an alarming booming cough with a whistle at the bottom of it, my eyes start watering so I can't see properly to try to fumble an inhaler and a cough drop out of my purse, and everyone in my vicinity flees for dear life. It's.. not great. I forgot to take a mask into the grocery store on Monday after work (because I had been normal for a couple of hours) and I felt like an asshole when I started coughing in the produce aisle and couldn't stop. I got out and made sure to put masks in my purse for next time. I'm not sure what else I can do. I just looked up how often I can use my salbutemol inhaler, and I've been using it too much. I'm going to try an around-the-clock dosage of cold meds for a couple of weeks - my airways are small and constrictive, and my nose and nasal passages are small and I have a bone spur behind one orbital ridge (sorry for the TMI), so it takes a long time for everything to clear, and maybe trying to get off the cold medicine as soon as I can is not the way to go. More than once in my life, people ranging from friends to complete strangers have commented on my 'cute little nose', and it turns out that a big honker would have served me better. Hmph.

2. Yesterday I was off, and I read for a bit and then decided to start addressing some of the areas of clutter I've been wanting to get to. I went through everything that had piled up on the dining room table and in a couple of corners. I bagged up some stuff for the thrift store and freecycled a bunch more - most things have already been picked up, which is always nice. The 'no more plastic grocery bags' thing is better for the environment and I'm all for it, but it presents a dilemma for porch pickups. I've had to get a bit creative and just hope people are okay with it.

Then I did the coffee table behind the chair, kind of between the family room and the kitchen. I still had a pile of the wallet photos that I used for the Christmas cards last December - a friend offered to print them for me and then misunderstood when I used 'sheet' meaning the sheet of four I usually get from the photo lab, and printed "sheets' like 8.5 by 11, which is A LARGE NUMBER OF PHOTOS. I send about fifty Christmas cards, which was not enough to use all the pictures. But they are great quality pictures of my beautiful children, and just throwing them out feels wrong. So there they sat. Not that I've actually thrown them out yet or anything, but they are now beside my computer and will not go back on the coffee table. 

3. The lower cupboard to the left of the stove. Jesus god, how many rice stick noodles did I think I was going to use? There is not enough white lady pad thai in the world. And salad dressing. I feel like there was salad dressing in there that was older than the house, and yet I am fairly confident that I did not bring any salad dressing when we moved in. As usual, I forgot to take a picture before I started - rest assured, it was much, much worse than this.

Now, of course, I realized I had made a grave error, because this cupboard was low down and hard on my back, and I couldn't do too much activity without provoking another coughing fit, but it was not a job that was going to be able to stay half done for long.

Need some vinegar? Rice vinegar? Champagne vinegar? Apple cider vinegar? We have ALL THE VINEGARS

The only thing that kept me from sticking my head in the oven immediately to my right (which isn't gas, so it would have been dramatic but fruitless) was the fact that most everything could go in the green bin. Me next garbage day, wheeling a green bin filled with expired noodles and beans and chia seeds and other non-mainstream grains to the curb. How the hell did I think I was going to remember any of that was in there? It was worse than the Great Cracker Purse of 2013.

Yes, I still have many more child-sized cups than is required for a family that no longer has children in it. Baby steps. You don't even want to know how recently I got rid of the sippy cups. 

4. Someone did indeed take the blue shelves before garbage pickup. I am resolved to believe they have found a new home with lovely people.

5. When Angus was little he called scissors "haircut" and frying pans "pancake". This randomly popped into my head today and I felt the need to share it. It's not quite synecdoche or metonymy, but I feel like it comes close. 

I took a friend out for a birthday lunch (HI NAT) and only the hot and sour soup made me cough. Tonight Collette is coming over for a movie (HI COLLETTE) so I don't get too weird and hermitty with Matt away for one more week. Happy week-end!