Head Noise

Last week, the love of my life was laid low with a nasty virus that caused diarrhea, vomiting and terrible lethargy. I know this because I was awakened at four in the morning to the sound of her worshiping the porcelain goddess. Now, I love my wife. But she sounds like a hog straining to birth her sixteenth farrow when she's barfing.

I was sound asleep in my desk chair, where I'd drifted off while reading blogs. Suddenly, seemingly from the bowels of Hell came the most blood-curdling groan. Once I came to, I realized what was going on, but for a moment there I thought we'd been invaded and they'd cut her throat!

The concert went on for several days. Suggestions of the ER and IV's were met with stony silence (in retrospect, that's exactly what she should have done, but noooo, not my wife). Through it all, I kept my distance.

Well, for the obvious reasons. One, I didn't want what she'd caught to catch me too. And second, I am an absolute wuss when it comes to listening to someone else puke. If I can maintain my distance, i can sometimes avoid the undesired reaction. But most of the time, if I can hear you, I'm going to be elbowing you aside to take my place before the throne.

I was good until Tuesday and then it hit me. Unlike wifey-poo, I took Immodium (the hell with my blood pressure – I wanted the liquid shits to stop now) right from the start. I was sick only a day and a half (unlike the 4+ days my wife was laid low) and I managed to avoid vomiting, despite significant queasiness, by consuming that old stand-by, Pepto-Bismal. Between the two and fluids support (a liter of gator-aide per day).

So, today was the first day I ventured away from the old homestead into town. Let me tell you, false hope of spring abounds around here. Mud is everywhere. Snow is all but gone again, despite six inches of the heavy white stuff earlier this week. But the winds today were brisk, lowering the temperature to near the freezing point with the wind chill factored in. But I didn't let that stop me. I grabbed a meal at Arby's drive through and sat in the parking lot, basking in the sun and reading a book I had with me (Gerry Boyle's Home Body) for two whole hours! I felt like a new man. I even drag raced a kid in a pick-up from a standing start out on Broadway on the way home. He beat me, of course. Big block V-8 is going to sock it to an in-line four no matter how tricked out it isn't. Still and all, it's starting to feel like Spring around here and that is dangerous. I checked last years entries around this time and we were fighting sub-zero temperatures and a foot of snow. It's just too dang early for spring to come and it bodes ill to this curmudgeon, for one. We will pay for it with hot, dry weather or hurricanes or tornadoes or all of the above, of that, I am certain. Droughts. Pestilences. Locusts. Grasshoppers.

Something wicked this way comes...