Absent:  I’ve been absent all week.  I’m sorry.

Bronchitis:  The reason I’ve been absent.  Spent yesterday in the emergency room.  I thought I had the flu, but Wednesday night I could hardly breathe.  Turns out the bronchitis triggered a mondo asthma attack, and they had me breathing through some smoky oxygen tube for thirty minutes before they gave me some drugs to take home.  I feel terrible.  My lungs are killing me.

Circus Cat:  I’ve decided that Cal used to be a cat in the circus.  You can tell by the way he’ll curl around your hand and chew on your fingers like a baby tiger drinking from a bottle.  This explains why he’s so rough, large, and what happened to the tail.  He was at a cheap circus, you see, and they tried to pass him off as a baby tiger.  He also will jump very high in the air to swat at things, which to me means someone used to shout, “Up!  Simba!  Up” at him.

Drugs:  I’m on some sort of antibiotic.  Other than that, they told me to take two Tylenol every few hours for the pain.  Let me tell you, yo, it doesn’t do shit for the pain.  Nor does it do anything for the coughing, the headache, the aching joints, the fever, the hallucinations, or the bad television.

Eric:  He has been wonderful through all of this, and even though he says he’s fine, I think he’s coming down with this, too.  I’m sure he’ll get it right when I get better and then I’ll catch it again and then he’ll catch it again and we’ll send it back and forth for the next two months.

Fuck:  A word said quite a bit around here lately.  My phone is broken.  AT&T has lost my Call Notes and — get this– says it’s a Y2K problem.  This was on New Year’s Eve.  I was like, “You’re AT&T!  Haven’t you done any testing?”  Apparently they won’t get my service back for another three weeks.  They can’t even transfer me somewhere else.  I’m lost in the system.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I am the only victim to the one Y2K problem.  Notice AT&T hasn’t been shouting it all over the news.  Then my computer busted when I tried to update it to Windows 98 (on New Year’s Eve, because I am efficient like that).  All sorts of stuff got screwed up with the upgrade, and there’s nothing anyone can do.  Apparently I’ve got to download a bunch of drivers, but I’m too sick to deal with it.  I bought a web cam that won’t work until I find one of these mythical drivers, too.  I bought Eric a CD player for his car for Christmas, and installing it became nothing but trouble.  After three trips to car places (and five jumps of his battery) we learned that the original people who installed the system forgot to reattach the battery correctly.  Oh, and we just got the washing machine fixed on Wednesday.  We were smelly people until then.

Gross:  I’m gross.  I really am.

HBO:  Five HBO channels and I can’t find one of them playing something decent for five weekdays in a row?

Ice Cream:  Along with Orange Juice, the sum of this week’s diet.

Junk: Our house is also filled with boxes and bags of things we are donating to the Salvation Army tomorrow.  We are getting some new furniture delivered and having the SA come and take the old stuff.  So right now our house looks quite a bit like my Grandmother’s.  And as I sit here in my robe, flannel shirt and underwear, I can’t help but think that I probably look a bit like my Grandmother right now.  That and I just said that Cal used to be a circus cat.  I’m losing it.

Knots: My back is a series of knots.  From all of the coughing and laying around, I am so sore.  It hurts to sit here and type, so I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna do this.

Laugh:  Every time I laugh I go into a coughing fit, so I have to decide when I’m really going to make that joke and when I’m going to just sit on it.

Milk:  We ran out three days ago.  I keep forgetting to tell Eric.  No tea for me.

Naps:  My life has been a series of extended naps since Monday.

Ozarka:  The new love of Eric’s life is the water cooler that sits in our kitchen.  Eric thinks this will solve all of our problems.  I give it three months.

Poor Me:  Sorry to be such a whiner.

Quit:  I haven’t had a cigarette all week.  No plans to have one ever again.  This is way too painful.

“Really?”:  I don’t know.  We’ll see how it goes.  I hope so.

Sweat: You sure do sweat when you’re sick.  I’m so gross.

The alphabet:  It’s longer than I remember it.

Undercover: I carry my blanket around like Linus.

Vacation:  I ended up taking the entire week off from work.  I’ve never been that sick.

Weekend:  I hope I’m feeling better tomorrow or Sunday.  At least to take care of Eric when he finally admits he’s sick too.

X-Ray:  They did an x-ray of my chest to diagnose.  Just want all of you to know that my lungs are in perfect health.  Well, except for the bronchitis thing.  They were worried it was pneumonia.

Y2K:  We had a great New Year’s.  Our friends from out of town were up the entire weekend and we played lots of games and saw live music and got really drunk (I finished a car bomb!) and we stayed up way too late playing Scotland Yard and Um Jammer Lammy and then I got bronchitis.  The nurse thought it was funny to say I caught the Y2K bug.  Isn’t she cute?

Zzzzzzzz:  time for another nap.