4 day weekend here I come! and a PSA

Every so often, my regular Friday off coincides with a Monday holiday giving me a lovely, unplanned 4 day weekend. Happily, this weekend is one of them! I'm dropping Jim off tomorrow morning at Noah's so his friends can pick him up and head to Vegas for their fantasy football draft - he won't be back until Sunday. We'll have breakfast before he goes and then the rest of the weekend is all me time. :) I'm going to get a pedicure, swing by the local Farmer's Market to get some goodies for gazpacho and I might even try my hand at some homemade bread. But, what I'm most looking forward to is 4 days of sewing. I have a private lesson tomorrow afternoon to learn how to add a lining to a wool skirt and a group class on boxer shorts on Sunday. In between those, I have a stack of other projects calling my name and an ipod full of tunes to keep me company. I'm so very excited!!


Illness update: Talked to the nurse at urgent care today and whadaya know, I'm a probable pertussis case. Wheeee! :/ Day 24 and I'm still coughing all night, though things have definitely improved in the past few days - I can taste my food again and I don't feel like I've been run over by a mack truck any more. The smoke and ash from the fires raging above us aren't helping matters, but what can you do. I'm hoping that within the next few weeks I should start feeling more and more like myself. I'm even going to try a weights class this weekend to see how it goes and to try and start building my strength back up.

And here is where I get on my soapbox:

Please, please, please vaccinate your children! I think I had a "mild" adult form of this disease and it has completely knocked me on my ass. For young kids and babies, severe complications and even death can occur. It's frightening for me, an adult, to not be able to breathe during the coughing fits, but for a child it can be much more than scary. This is not like a mild cold or flu bug that your body will shake off after a few days. I can't imagine watching a child with this - the vomiting while coughing, turning blue from not breathing, etc. :( This is a nasty little bug and there is a reason a vaccine was developed for it.

And for everyone, please talk to your doctor about getting the Tdap booster shot - this covers diptheria, pertussis and tetanus. Additional information can be found here. Immunity to pertussis wanes as you get older - pertussis appears to be on the rise and teens and adults are the reservoirs. Not only can the booster prevent you from getting sick (I can't stress enough that you DO NOT WANT THIS BUG!), but it could prevent you from getting it and passing it along to a young child.

I'll step off my soapbox now, but please feel free to ask me any questions you may have about this. After the past month, it's something that has become extremely important to me and I hope to all of you, too.

Whoop, what?!

I've been sick as a dog for 16 days and counting. I cough all day and all through the night, I have upper-respiratory infection symptoms and I'm not sleeping because, well, I can't stop coughing. Trip to the urgent care didn't do anything and I'm exhausted because I can't stop coughing long enough to get a full night's sleep. My boss is back from vacation, took one look at me, heard my symptoms and pretty much thinks I have Pertussis, aka Whooping Cough. Eff me. This damn cough could go on for WEEKS! WEEKS people! I'm trying to get my dr. to call in a prescription for a Z-pack and maybe some chemoprophy for Jim. I'm exhausted, I miss my routine and I miss my sleep. So far, 30 hasn't been much fun. :(

Weekend Rewind

The short answer is it was far from exciting. That lovely little cold I picked up last week? Yeah, well, it decided to go crazy this weekend, leading Jim to ask at one point "How are you getting worse?!?" I was home on the couch from late Friday night until Tuesday morning, when I finally drug myself back into work. And it's taken me until this morning to finally feel somewhat normal. It's the cold from hell.

Before I became permanently attached to my couch this weekend, I did have a fun Friday night. Jim and I decided to have dinner at the Farmer's Market at the Grove, but since I get off of work before him, I went early and did a little shopping. Mainly, this was an excuse to swing by Victoria's Secret to see Heidi Klum who was doing makeovers there for 2 hours to promote her new make-up line. I love Project Runway and was quite excited to see her up close. Stupid me forgot my camera, but I did grab a couple of camera-phone pics.

She is so pretty and seems so sweet! She was all dolled up, but wow --- the girl has some really good genes going on there. They had other professional make-up artists at the event as well doing free make-overs, so I took advantage of it. My artist said that Heidi is just a genuinely nice person and a lot of fun. Always nice to hear.

After getting my Heidi fix, I headed over to the Apple store to pick up a protective case for my new computer. And wouldn't you know... I bought a pink neoprene one! The store was packed to the gills with folks because it was the launch of their new operating system. My one observation was that the store had quite the funky smell --- I'll let you come to your own conclusions on why that might be....

Jim finally met me for dinner around 8ish and we scored a table outside. We started off with soup, lobster bisque for me, corn chowder for him, and then he had the meatloaf and I had the chicken greek salad. All of the food hit the spot. As we were waiting for the check, a couple started walking in the restaurant, I looked up and thought "Hmmm, that guy looks familiar". Well, that would be because it was Mr. and Mrs. Pearl! They stopped and we chatted for a bit, but they were just getting ready for a meal and we were past done with ours, so we weren't able to combine our dinners. :( But, it's always fun to run into friends unexpectedly.

The rest of the weekend was spent on the couch with hubs watching sports 24/7. I apologized for being so boring to which he responded "What are you talking about? I've had yummy food (re: junk food), beer and watched a ton of sports. What is boring about that?!" Men.

This weekend I'm flying to my Mom's house to spend the weekend with her and help her clean/organize the house. And then I'm flying back on Sunday morning in time for lunch for my mother-in-law's birthday. Lots of family stuff this weekend, but it should be fun!

It's been a looong week

And I'm guessing that most of the Southern California area would probably agree with me. Unless you've been hiding under a rock, then you know that many areas of Southern California were ablaze this week, fueled on by those handy-dandy Santa Ana winds and a severe lack of rain in our not so distant past. Hubs and I were not directly affected, but one of my besties, her parents and in-laws as well as my other besties' parents and in-laws were all evacuated from their homes earlier this week and I had several other friends who were close to having to do the same. I'm drained from watching and reading all of the coverage, and yet, just like 9/11, I just couldn't seem to turn it off. I can only imagine how stressful this week was for those that were directly affected. No one we know lost their home, but sadly, many people did this week. So very sad. Thankfully, it appears that the firefighters are starting to get a handle on things as the weather is cooling off and the winds are dying down, but it's going to be a long time before things get back to normal for a lot of people.

In other news, I managed to catch a cold this week --- yes, I know it was like 94 degrees here, ugh -- but nonetheless, I've been sick since Tuesday night. Lovely. I've been coming home after work and just laying around like a slug, but I'm hoping to be all better by the end of this weekend.

The hubs has had a pretty good week though; the Sox won the ALCS Sunday night to advance to the World Series, then routed Colorado during Game 1 and pulled out a close win during Game 2. I am only a baseball during the post-season (you know, when games actually mean something), so I've been enjoying the Red Sox run to the World Series as well. Go Sox!!!

To try to sweeten up the week a little, I hit up Starbucks on my way into work this morning and grabbed a pumpkin scone --- soooo good! --- and plan on making a stop after work for a pumpkin spice latte as well. I'm ready to put this week to bed and get on with the weekend already....

home sick

Started having that icky feeling in the back of my throat Sunday night and by yesterday morning I felt seriously yucky. Thankfully Monday was a holiday for me so I just laid around on the couch and dozed/watched tv/caught up on my blog reading. Sadly, I'm not feeling much better today, so I'm having a repeat performance --- though it's definitely not a holiday today, it's a full-fledged sick day. Booo!