Hope you get on your plane, meara!

My plans are still kind of up in the air. May still be able to get a flight on Christmas Eve, but if not I've rebooked for after Christmas. All the trains and ferries are booked up until after Christmas. The soonest BA would offer G another flight would get him in to Boston at 11pm on Christmas day, so that's not a particularly nice option.

Jars, that bites. Stupid weather.

We are keeping a (jaundiced) eye on the weather here, too; we've got a freezing rain forecast wavering in and out, and after the Driving Through DeathStorm 201o last year, I flatly told D if the weather was bad, we were staying home.

I hope the forecast changes for the better.

I h

Teppy, you want I should bring you some salt? Might it help?

Hee! We'll always have Cleveland, Bev!

Since I am Instant Gratification Girl, I woke up today thinking that SURELY I would feel all better and BURSTING with good health. I mean, I've already had 2 whole doses of antibiotics!

Seriously, I do always think that when I start a course of meds for an illness. Sadly, the meds don't work that way. Although I have a surge of speed-freaky energy going on from the steroid shot, which is good, since I have a LOT of work to do.

And the codeine is my new best friend, because I am down to almost no coughing. Woo!

DJ so sorry. Teppy glad you finally went to doctor. Oh and Hil, Years ago my dentist gave me some statistics on how people who have wisdom teeth out end up in better dental health than those who leave teeth in. But at the time he told me a minority disagreed with routine wt extraction. Don't know current thinking on this. Ah same debate: [link]

According to above link (and I have no reason to think particularly reliable) most people don't have room in mouth for WT. One thing that should be checked: if they crowd your mouth they can cause all sort of problems.

We'll always have Cleveland

Yep.

And the codeine is my new best friend

I swear that codeine is the only thing that stops coughing. With the bronchitis I had as a kid, I would cough for weeks and I remember night after night sitting up coughing into a pillow because I didn't want to keep waking people up. Teachers would send me home because of the cough, even though my mother would beg them to let me stay, because the disease was over. (I missed about a third of first and second grade.) Then as an adult, I was prescribed codeine. I had the best doctor in the world as a child, but why was there no codeine?

Dr. Marchuk was pretty conservative about some things, so I actually understand why. He was the one who told me, "You must never smoke," and tried to get adults to cut down or quit, back in the '50s when smoking was on practically no doctor's radar. He was an Austrian emigre who fled Hitler without enough documentation to prove he was already a doctor, so he went to medical school again. He also made house calls.

Happy birthday, Shanie!

Good morning, yon Bitches. I'm sitting here, bleary, trying to fight off some sort of ick that I just don't have time for. My mother descends tomorrow (she's flying through Minneapolis-- HA!) and I have a shitton to do before then. Including wrap her presents.

She's probably going to be disappointed and yet... I find myself not worried about it.

So sorry about the other sickies and all the travel woes. I think we need a Buffista holiday that would take place like in... February. On Buffista Island. With nice moderate temperatures and no travel issues.

She's probably going to be disappointed and yet... I find myself not worried about it.

One of my favorite mantras, especially with family: why would you expect things to be any different?

I am cranky over boy stuff. Vortex, as if there was ever any doubt, is the total bomb diggity.

It's gray, the office is tomb-like (down to the chill--and I'm not usually that sensitive to cold), and I want to curl up under a warm cat and go to sleep.

I'm not sick but I wonder if my manager would let me go home unenthused.

One of my favorite mantras, especially with family: why would you expect things to be any different?

Took me a long, long time to learn that one. Used to be that I was the one who held Christmas together in the family-- getting the tree, decorating, planning the huge feast and basically working myself ragged and not only did no one care, they kind of went out of their way to tell me how much they hated Christmas, how it was such a pain, and in other words, be total Scrooges. And still... I tried. I had more traumatic Christmases than any one human can begin to imagine, part of it probably due to my own stubbornness that I Would Make Christmas Great and Change Their Minds.

Finally, one year, I snapped. Just decided they'd beat the Christmas right out of me and I wasn't going to care anymore.

You should've seen the reaction that year. They were kind of stunned when a couple weeks before Christmas there was no tree, no plans for a special meal, no questions about gifts or teasing comments about what they were receiving. And when they asked and I responded with "Don't know, don't care," you should've seen the faces. They'd depended on me for their Christmas spirit even as they'd beat it down with their own sourness. And they acknowledged that they always enjoyed the day itself-- that it was always better than they were expecting it to be. To be faced with the possibility of it not happening was pretty hard on them.

And I didn't care.

My mother, of course, told me I was being selfish, without ever once acknowledging she'd been the primary culprit. (Of course not-- that would require self-awareness of which the woman has absolutely none.)

But I still didn't care.

Since then, I've hit a much better balance. The people around me contribute, I try not to get my expectations up too high and realize that we're never going to have a Norman Rockwell Christmas, and generally, we end up with a really pleasant day.

We now have tickets for Christmas Eve, to Dublin. There was just no way to get G home to Boston, so he'll be in Dublin with me.

In 'I didn't have a hope in hell anyway' news, Dublin airport has been closed since lunchtime due to snow, so my flight wouldn't have gone even if Heathrow weren't a shower of gobshites.