Just a little sick

"Just a little sick" has so many disadvantages! I feel slow-witted and tire easily, and am short tempered and sleepy, but I have no dramatic symptoms to signal others that I'm sick. Worse than that, I have none to signal myself. I keep forgetting I just don't feel very good. It's too hot, and windy. Keith, Marty and Holly are leaving for a long weekend for a big SCA campout I used to not even consider optional, but now I have no interest in that. (That's not a symptom of being a little sick; I quit going to Grand Outlandish a few years ago.) Kirby's really busy being in a film these days. I hear him upstairs getting ready to go, and it's 5:30 in the morning.

But the good thing about this feeling of unsettleness and low-level vague discomfort is that it so often comes just before a burst of happy activity. And being just vaguely sick reminds me that sometimes the very best thing to do is just breathe consciously and think lighter, healthier thoughts. It doesn't cure everything, but it makes that moment a little better, and enough better moments seem to make the sky bigger.

I'm glad to have my family around me, and if my little sickness can be the worst thing today, that's fantastic!!

Last night I missed getting in the hot tub with Keith. I thought he was waiting for me. He thought I had said I didn't want to. It wasn't *too* sad, but the reason I was late was that Marty was asking me about Russia, and the Soviet Union, and the Ukraine, and why people didn't talk about that much, and the cold war, and space race, and WWII, and how what we call USSR they had called CCCP, and that what we call US, in French and Spanish is EU (and I didn't even think to wonder until just now how in French and Spanish they indicate "the European Union"). That conversation with Marty involved dusting off a globe and getting out a packet of "Barq's Soviet Stuff." We got two, but I only found one, and it was missing the temporary tattoo of Gorbachev's birthmark. The other, with the tattoos, is probably in the box of stuff for Kirby to have when he moves out. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Barq's Rootbeer offered little packets of real Soviet stuff (lapel or hat pins, ribbons for rallies, stamps) if you sent in some labels or parts of cardboard cartons from rootbeer or something. We got two. Should've (of course, the packrat in me says loudly) gotten more!