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too sick for anything but bed
Sunday, August 20 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I'd taken 150 mg of diphenhydramine before I'd gone to sleep last night, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, it really felt like the wrong thing to have taken. I couldn't tell exactly why, but the problem seemed to be in my guts. It soon became clear that I had a pretty bad case of diarrhea, which was something I could do something about. After clearing what I could and blasting my ass with the ass blaster, I returned to be bed and eventually fell asleep.
When I woke up late this morning, I wasn't feeling good at all, though I was able to drag myself out to the great room. Gretchen made me some hot tea (containing both black tea and ginger tea) and some sour dough toast. Though my guts were feeling all kinds of messed up, my appetite was normal. We managed to play Spelling Bee as usual, but then I crawled back into bed and slept for awhile while Gretchen went down to the dock to take advantage of the warmer, sunnier weather that had arrived.
Eventually I crawled out of bed and even managed to make myself do some foundation insulation work. I hadn't been happy with the way I'd left things at the bottom of the ditch of the first sheet of styrofoam I'd installed on the cabin's south foundation wall, so I got down in there and dug out some sand I'd used to force the sheet against the wall and managed to bury some additional styrofoam at right on top of the footing, which is something I like to do maximize the amount of possible insulation installed given the depth I am able to dig. After that, I figured out how to put my custom three foot ladder into the ditch to facilitate access to subsequent slots for styrofoam insulation. By then, my energy was badly depleted, and all I could do was clean up the worksite so it wouldn't be a complete mess while I was away. This involved covering the dirt piles with plastic sheeting and picking up nearly all the styrofoam fragments that had resulted from all the fussy cuts and cut-away spray foam.
I was searching my mind for anything I might've eaten that could've upset my guts so badly as to leave me mostly bedridden. Perhaps it was the two week old chili. But Gretchen had eaten that with no problem. So maybe I'd come into contact with a "stomach bug" that she'd somehow avoided.
I was inside the cabin reading stuff on a Chromebook when Gretchen returned from the dock. She said that it had been too cold for swimming and suggested that maybe we should just head back to Hurley early. That seemed like a good idea to me, because there was no way I'd be doing any additional work or going for any sort of nature walk. So we cleaned up the cabin, packed up our stuff, loaded up the dogs, and hit the road. Neville's right paw is still bothering him, but he was able (for the first time since his injury a week ago) to get into the Chevy Bolt by himself.
When we got back to our house in Hurley, we found it was all nice and tidy because our new cleaner (the daughter of one of Gretchen's bookstore colleagues) and been by to clean it. Also, I'd been a little nervous about how Lester the Cat would do, since we'd left him wearing the cone of shame unsupervised during our absence (since it's the only thing keeping him from chewing his wrist into a bloody mess). But he seemed perfectly fine and was still wearing the cone.
I climbed into bed pretty much immediately and slept for who knows how long, soon joined by Diane the Cat and the two dogs. Meanwhile Gretchen met up with our friend Kate in Saugerties to watch a movie supposedly comprised entirely of cute cat videos.
Eventually I ate half a pint of vegan Netflix & Chilled Ben & Jerry's ice cream and took a nice hot bath, but then I climbed right back into bed and amused myself watching old Baitcar clips on YouTube.
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