Craptastic Christmas

Christmas morning was going along pretty well until about 9:30 when I got the phone call.

My boss died of a heart attack.

This isn't a boo-hoo for me post, but the reality of things is that my time at my job is limited. I love my job, love the people I work with. I don't want to be looking for a new job, but I have to. With one other lawyer in the office with his own secretary and not enough work to warrant having another it isn't too hard to figure out. I know there is still work here for me to do for a little while, and I don't want to leave our partner and his secretary high and dry but at the same time I don't want to feel like I'm sucking them dry by staying on. I know finances are going to get tight.

On the good side, if there is such a thing in this situation, there are enough local attorneys and judges that think rather highly of me that it should be pretty easy for me to move into a position at another firm rather smoothly or have kicking references in the least.

The bad side of things is that my fields of knowledge are family and criminal law. Not that there aren't other family and criminal law attorneys in town, because there are, they just aren't like my boss. And there is only one other firm in town presently looking for staff, and the lawyer there doesn't really do family law and no one there does criminal law. But, I learned this job from nothing and can and will do the same where ever I end up.

CRAPTASTIC!

My thoughts of victory were...

SMASHED!

I'm not over being sick and now it's back....with a vengeance.

So I finally decided that three weeks of trying to fight the battle myself was a battle well fought but I was defeated none the less. I went to the Doctor this morning.

First off, it PISSES ME OFF when I don't actually SEE the Doctor yet I have to PAY as if I did. OK, so I saw him for like 3.2 seconds - only AFTER the damn medical student decided to try to KILL ME!

First she almost poked a hole in my brain as she was digging, I mean looking, in my already sore ears. Then she was asking me all these questions that were totally unrelated to why I was at the doctors office this morning. Like, do I have trouble urinating or use chewing tobacco? Well, I guess I never really thought about the correlation between a sinus infection and/or bronchitis and whether or not I can pee...or if I use chewing tobacco.

Then she diagnosed me with a sinus infection and gave me a prescription for antibiotics. Amoxicillin. Hello!?! Brain Trust?!? I just TOLD YOU I'M ALLERGIC TO PENECILLIN!!!!! Get it?!? AmxoCILLIN....PeneCILLIN....yep! Same thing - allergic! Told you twice! Two seconds before you handed me the script.

And then she was all freaked out, didn't know what to give me instead of something with "cillin" at the end of it. Apparently she's never heard of the Z-Pak. Had she looked in my chart she would have seen that it's what I always get. Damn idiot. As if a sinus infection isn't bad enough she thought I needed a heaping helping of anaphalactic shock on the side.

NOT a happy camper!

Holy Crap Ola! It worked!

Yesterday I felt like such crap with my sore throat, I wanted to do nothing but curl up in a warm blanket and hibernate.

After supper last night that's exactly what I did. I put on my sweats, my wool socks and my newly clean, protected and dry Ugg boots and parked my ass on the couch. I even managed to fall asleep for about 30 minutes. After I put my daughter to bed I took some Delysum cough syrup and an OTC night time cold pill and climbed into bed, sweats and Ugg boots and all.

For the first time in over a week I ended up peeling off the layers rather quickly. Last night was the first night in over a week that I haven't slept dressed as though I was Nanook of the North sleeping out in the open on the Arctic tundra.

This morning I woke up early feeling great. No sore throat. No more cotton ball full of goo.

Enough is enough already!!!

Apparently my body has been trying to tell me something the last couple weeks and I've either been to stupid to realize it or to busy to care. So, Tuesday I was slapped with a wicked sore throat as a wake up call to pay attention. So now I feel like I swallowed a brillo pad and a cotton ball soaked in goo that has lodged itself directly behind that hangy thing in my throat. Ick Ick Ick. I feel like total shit, there's no other way to describe it.


I guess I should have known something was up. I have been totally carb loading for the past 4 days. Normally I only crave those things like this when I have some major illness coming on. Now I don't care if I eat or not. Just swallowing the saliva that forms in my mouth is painful enough. It's kind of like my body's way of taking care of itself since, historically, I refuse to eat when I'm sick. I have been forcing myself to eat soup at lunch because if I don't eat anything I have a tendency to get lightheaded and pass out. That probably wouldn't be the best thing to happen at work. Yeah, I know, I'm still working, but if I stay home when I'm like this it's at least 100% worse because then I'm all "poor me" and when I'm at work I know I just have to keep on moving.

The other day I did something that I still can't believe I did, but it's for a good purpose. I got my Ugg's wet again, on purpose! I ordered the cleaner & conditioner and protector off the website and got to it on Monday night. It's a total bummer I haven't been able to wear them since Sunday again, but they should be good to go tonight. They do look a lot better, and now they're really really well protected against future water mishaps. I made sure of it by using nearly 1/2 the bottle of protector spray. Hey, can't ever be too cautious!

I think I'm only going to suffer with this sore throat crap for another day before I call the Doc to get some meds. I'm wiped out.

Still drying off and thawing out

I learned a very valuable lesson yesterday on my trip to Chicago with my cousin Jenn....Ugg's
need to be waterproofed. Seriously, no matter what, if you have a pair, waterproof them right now! What I'm pissed at the most is that they're still wet and I can't wear them. I love those things.

We were doing so good with the weather until my husband called to check in on us and let me know that the weather at home was crap - freezing rain and sleet. Just as I was closing my phone it started to snow just a little bit.

We were at Millennium Park watching people wipe out on the ice skating rink and checking out "The Bean" and took a cab to Ed Debevick's for lunch. When we came out of Ed's there was a thin layer of snow covering the city. The snow wasn't a problem, shortly after that it turned to rain, THAT was the problem.

So, until the point where my Ugg boots became drenched from the rain and the yuck on the streets, my feet were toasty warm and comfortable. From there it went from bad to worse.

My drive home was a trip...2 hours to go what would normally take an hour 10. But the roads were covered with slushy mix and I couldn't go much more than 60 mph. By the time I got home I had such a terrible headache from squinting (it rain/sleeted the whole way home) that I thought my head was going to explode. And the time we had to spend getting the layer of freezing rain off our cars in the Metra parking lot...eww.

I did get some Christmas shopping done at American Girl. And we went to the German festival and that was a lot of fun. It was so funny to be around so many people who actually knew how to speak German! Loved it!! And it took me back to times when my Oma was still around...lots of the traditional German Christmas things all around. One thing that was pretty funny was this guy in front of us in line at one of the vendor booths...we were getting hot mulled wine in a little boot glass and it was called kinderweiss, he was telling us all about it, blah blah blah like he was the president of Germany. He went up to order his wine and he pronounced it to the lady "kind-er-wise" and she rather rudely corrected him that it was pronounced "kin-der-vise". Too funny!! He gave us a look that you could tell he'd gotten his legs yanked out from under him!

We had a great time and we'll for sure be doing it again...when the weather isn't so yuck!!!!

P.S. ~ Sorry Ricardo, no winter fashion show on the blog. I've decided that skinny jeans were the biggest fashion mistake EVER. Unless you're the shape of a pencil, you have NO RIGHT to subject innocent people to THAT! They were promptly returned and I was very fashionable in my boot cut jeans NOT TUCKED IN to my boots.