Now only sick half-time

Since yesterday morning I've been feeling better than I was this weekend. Ugh, this sickness is kicking my butt, though. And it's the second time. I just got over a similar sickness a week before getting sick again!

Similar to last time it looks like there's going to be a daily pattern. I tend to feel mostly-better in the morning. Perhaps sleeping overnight helps reset things. A hot shower to start the day helps clear things out, too. Then sometime around mid-afternoon things head south again. The prescriptions I got yesterday are preventing the worst of the symptoms I experienced this weekend. But last night I hit the wall at about 8pm and went to bed early.

Going to bed early isn't exactly a panacea, unfortunately. I'm waking several times throughout the night. Usually I can get back to sleep right away. But kind of as a consequence of falling asleep early I'm also waking up early. Like, after 5am I just toss and turn in bed, not really able to get any additional sleep.

You might think, "Oh! Just get up early and be productive, then." Yeah, no. It doesn't work that way. Just because my body won't sleep anymore after 5am doesn't mean it's actually ready to be awake at 5am. I get to spend two hours in a zombie twilight where my body is saying, "We're done sleeping," while my brain is saying, "Well, we're not ready to be awake yet." Ugh.

"Zombie twilight" describes how I feel by late afternoon, too. I'm awake— as in, not asleep—but I can't bring myself to focus on a task more difficult than mindlessly surfing the web or maybe watching TV. Over the weekend I thought, "Hey, with canceling our trip to Phoenix I'll have lots of time to catch up on my blog!" Yeah, no. I don't even have the energy or mental focus to blog.

Field Trip Fails - The Empty Firehouse

Recently I saw a thread online about school field trip fails. On the list are failures of planning, organizers not appreciating what students actually want, crises created by student misbehavior, and even just a few plain-old accidents. That reminded me of a field trip I found particularly disappointing.

When I was in second grade, my class visited the local fire station. Fire stations are pretty cool, right? There are those big trucks to look at (they're extra big when you're little second graders!), all the interesting gear firemen have, and of course, the firemen (and firewomen— though there weren't any back then) themselves. Except when we rolled up to the firehouse in our school buses the trucks and teams had just rolled out to respond to an emergency call. The station was empty.

I remember the several dozen of us 2nd graders wandering around the empty station. The garage built for fire trucks sure seemed huge without the fire trucks in them. And all the fancy gear? Well, most of that was gone, too. There was, like, one pair of boots left over. Hey, kids, look! A pair of boots!

Maybe saddest of all was that we didn't even try waiting to see if we could tour the station after the crew returned. The teachers packed us back up into the buses to return to school after a few minutes of aimless wandering. Maybe they only booked an hour for the trip including the travel time.

Moral of the story: Don't plan a field trip to the fire station when there's also a fire scheduled!