WNBP: This Time I Have Something To Say!!

Sometimes it's hard to come up with things for the Wednesday Night Bullet Post.  Yes, even with my glamorous, high profile existence it can be a trial to put something together for my weekly nod to The Blog.

This week, however, I honestly don't think I can even find enough space on the web to report out the strange goings on around here!  I'm not even going to waste time blathering as part of some rambling intro.  I'm just gonna charge right ahead because, if I don't, I might just explode from holding it all in.

*When last we left our intrepid Sheepie, she was hacking, coughing, choking and wheezing.

*By Thursday, I'd had enough and called the doc's office in order that I might beg for something to relieve my drippy symptoms.

*Thankfully, she was open to the idea of calling in an antibiotic and some of that sweet, sweet cough syrup with the codeine in it.

*Bless her little heart and that of all her descendants from now until the end of time because I was at the point where, if I didn't get some sleep, I was going to start chatting with the purple monkeys swinging merrily from the ceiling.

*She also suggested that I come in.  Just as a precaution, she said, given how quickly I've succumbed to pneumonia in years past.

*I managed to snag an afternoon appointment, one that would let me stay at school until the last block of the day.

*The kids have gym and whatnot during that block so I wouldn't be missing much.

*Little Einstein's sad story was playing itself out in the worst possible way in spite of my hopes for better outcomes.

*I don't claim to know much about the inner workings of the universe and why bad things happen, but I did know two things at that point.

*First, he was going to come to school.  It's just what he does.

*And second, I was going to be there with him.  Tissues, cough drops and all.

*The doctor was double booked all day, mostly so she could see people who looked and sounded just like me.

*Now is not the time for a Maine vacation.  We are currently under quarantine.  Just daub some lamb's blood on the border, make the sign of the cross and run back to the place from whence you came.

*My visit with the doc went something like this:

Doctor Judy:  Well, let's see what we have going on here...

Sheepish Annie:  Okey-dokey.  Here's my face!

(Sheepie leans forward expectantly, pushing her blotchy, pale visage within inches of Doctor Judy.  To her credit, the doctor does not recoil in horror. )

DJ:  Um...I was thinking maybe I could listen to your chest first.  See?  I have this nice stethoscope and everything.

SA:  No.  You are supposed to do that thing where you tap on my face and watch me wince in agony when you hit that spot where all the snot clots live.  So, let's go.  Here's my face!

DJ:  Sure.  We can do that.  But how about I just get a little listen to the ol' lungs first?  Just to get it out of the way so I can concentrate on the face tapping.

SA:  Well, if it makes you happy...


*We never actually got around to the face tapping.

*We spent more time debating whether or not it made sense to get the chest x-ray or not.

*We finally agreed that it didn't make sense.  The treatment is the same either way and the doctor was leaving Monday morning for a week's worth of conferences.

*In my defense, viral pneumonia is not at all like the bacterial version with which I have such a long and not-so-happy history.

*And the sneezing kind of distracted me from the wheezing.  I somehow missed the pneumonia symptoms.

*I had to promise to use the stupid inhaler she prescribed even though I thought that was a little bit of overkill.

*The sinus problems cleared up within days of taking the antibiotic.

*The wheezing did not.

*And now I have to publicly apologize for all the mean stuff I said about the stupid inhaler because it is right and I am wrong.

*Breathing during the day is really rather nice.

*I still cough a lot at night.

*Which is why I was kind of on the stupid side come Monday morning.  Three hours of sleep will do that to a girl.

*And being stupid is not conducive to realizing that your classroom has been broken into as you are getting ready for your Monday classes.

*Seriously.  Took me almost fifteen minutes before I caught on.

*There was a doorknob ripped off and sitting in the middle of the floor.

*I picked it up and put it on the table in another room.

*Again, in my defense, they are re-keying and replacing a lot of knobs around the school.

*But failing to notice the jagged shards of metal sticking out of it was probably something of an error on my part...

*My students and I had to vacate the classroom for the day while the police processed all the evidence I'd spent fifteen minutes thoroughly contaminating.

*When I arrived at school yesterday morning, I discovered a little frog happily hopping his way up the stairs.

*This cause me to drop my teacher stuff, throw up my hands and cry, "First Little Einstein, next the plague befalls me, then miscreants invade my teaching space...and now it's raining frogs!!!  If I were a less rational person, I'd be pretty darned worried!!"

*Should have kept my stupid, codeine befuddled mouth shut...

*Last night, just as the narcotics kicked in, I heard a rumbling in the distance.

*Then it got closer.

*Then the building began to shake and sway.

*And the neighbors began yelling things like, "Whoa!" and "Holy sh**, dude!!"

*And the cats fled.

*Apparently the last item on the Armageddon Special menu is an earthquake.

*We don't get earthquakes in Maine.  At least not ones that ring in somewhere around a 4 on the magnitude scale.

*We don't handle that well.  We get all excited and start posting on Facebook before the last quiver of the tortured earth.  We make lots of phone calls.

*We talk about it for days.

*It's kind of like a snowstorm in Florida.

*Plus I had that whole Plague/Frog/Other Horrible Stuff going on so I might have been attaching a little more meaning to the event than others.

*Actually, I was kind of loopy when the thing went down and it took me a while to realize that it wasn't just me falling off the couch.

*Everything is fine.  The worst part was trying to figure out what that plastic cap sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor went with.

*Eventually narrowed it down to the pepper grinder that fell from its perch over the stove.

*That took over an hour.  Blame the cough medicine.

*Kitties got extra treats for surviving the horror that was The Kind Of Great Quake Of 2012.

*The library patron who snagged Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War ahead of me finally relinquished his/her hold on it and I was able to secure it for myself.

*Since I was already at the virtual library anyway, I figured I might as well download the audio version of  Moon Called (Mercy Thompson) again.

*I never finished it when I had it over the summer and was wondering what was going to happen.

*Only have one day left on the loan, though.  Might not make it this time either.

*But checking it out again is free so I suppose that's not going to be a big issue.

*Reading has been slow since the plague came into my life.  I'm either too miserable to concentrate or too stoned from the medication to focus.

*But I'm persevering.  I'm nothing if not dedicated.

*Besides, I'm thinking the end of the world is nigh and that zombies will soon be strolling the streets so I might as well get in as much of the reading and listening as possible before civilization crumbles utterly...


Yes, it's been busy over here.  And I mean busy in the weirdest possible way as opposed to the kind of busy where you have to go shoe shopping, eat bonbons and juggle simultaneous dates with male supermodels on the same Friday night.

Of course, if simultaneously appearing male supermodels suddenly showed up at my door looking for dates that might also signal the end of the world but I think I could live with that...

SA (who now has the hiccups and is also blaming that on the Armageddon Syndrome)