dropsinthewell

“I’ve got a little bit of a cough,” I have heard that before. Someone  says, “I’ve got a little bit of a cough,” and then they proceed to sneeze, cough, and drip all over you.

When I was young, I used to think, “It’s a little bit of a cough, I can tough it out.” It never occurred to me that while I was being tough and brave and going to work, that I was also exposing all the people who had to come into contact with my “little bit of a cough,” and would then be infected.

Now, it’s happening to me in the opposite case. “I’ve got a little bit of a cough, but I really want to have a practice.” More than one student told me that this week, and I went ahead and let them practice…and cough…and sneeze…all over! Now, I’ve got the disease and it’s more than a little cough, I can tell you!

I began to get the runny eyes and nose, the scratchy throat and the congestion within hours of ending the practice with ill performers. I have spent my weekend sleeping, coughing, and then sleeping some more. I went out into the beautiful weather once but it was too much for my light-headed brain, so my entire walk was a stride out the door and a U-turn right back inside. So much for enjoying the great outdoors when you have a little bit of a cough.

I sent my husband to his mother’s for the day on the worst day of my symptoms. I figured he would enjoy her company and her cooking and he wouldn’t be in danger of getting my “little bit of a cough” from all the germs I might drip all over the phone, sinks, toilet, etc.

The question now is, how much of a “little cough” should I have before I don’t go to school and disease all over my students? I always agonize over this. As I already said, I used to just tough it through, but I’m not so quick to take my germs to work anymore. So I agonize: how sick is too sick to be exposed to other people?

I’ve seen all the commercials about pills you can take that will make it so that you don’t look like you have a cold or you don’t feel like you have the flu, but I wonder if those are a good idea. Won’t it take longer to recover if you just keep powering through, hyped up on some symptom-covering drugs?

I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but maybe not until the over-the-counter medication wears off. But for now, I’m going to go to bed and hope that tomorrow morning will mean I’m ready to go to work. However, if I wake up and I’ve been dreaming about meeting and falling in love with a deer and going off to live happily together in the woods…I’ll know that I still have some recovery left to do and my “little bit of a cough is not yet done!”

Have a healthy week everyone and I hope I haven’t breathed too many germs on you!

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

No, I’m not talking about hunting, or even referring to school days. The time of year I mean is professional football time. That’s right, folks, those millionaire goal-post runners are at it again and that means life at our house becomes much more complicated. I have to somehow figure out how to live with the constant din of football games in my ears for at least three days a week and Roy has to figure out why, when he’s shouting excellent advice at them, the Vikings don’t do a better job for him.

It’s not that I am unfamiliar with the Vikings…my father is also a die-hard Vikings fan; but I found out what real Viking-mania was all about when I got married. Sundays at our house are a screaming good time with the Vikings at the center of the maelstrom.

No one is safe. The dog is personally terrified when the screaming, yelling, jumping out of the chair and agitated pacing begins each week. She has become so traumatized that I think all I’d have to do is show her the color purple and she would immediately slink downstairs with her tale between her legs.

If only the Vikings would cooperate, but they have this terrible tendency to do what they think is right, which many times clashes with Roy wants them to do.

“No, no! Don’t run the ball through that line,” he will scream, holding his head and moaning. “You need to pass, can’t you just pass the ball, for pete’s sake?”

I have learned to make myself scarce during these traumatic Sunday events. There’s always laundry to do or cleaning in some other room to take care of. Unfortunately, I’m all he’s got to vent his game day hysteria on.

“Jackie, you’ve got to see this! You won’t believe it! They’re gonna show it on replay; hurry up or you’ll miss it!”

So, I run in from wherever I was hiding and watch a football play involving some men with a football, running down a field and eventually—falling down.

“Do you believe that?” he will exclaim in the voice of a man whose frustration is vindicated.

There is only one response  in these situations. I put a properly sorrowful expression on my face and shake my head slowly and deliberately to indicate my inability to comprehend such a stupid play. That’s if he looks and sounds angry or disgusted.

Now, if he sounds happy and excited (not usually), then I clap my hands and say, “Wonderful!” in the same voice I would use if my grandson voluntarily used the potty.

The Vikings won on this particular Sunday, so all is sweetness and light at our house. The dog is upstairs, happily hanging out with Roy and I am able to read a book in relative peace, except for the times I must listen to another rave about something the Vikings did right, but “could have done better.” I wear my practiced, “oh that’s serious and you are so right,” expression for this conversation and all is good.

Vikings, if you could manage to get Roy a contact into your games, so he could call the plays and you would do them right, I would be very grateful. I’m not alone in this request, either. I had a friend at work the other day say, “It’s pretty loud and obnoxious at my house when the Vikings are on. It’s really kind of embarrassing when the windows are open.”

I replied tiredly, “I feel your pain. Just shut the windows and keep reminding yourself that you are not alone. Also, touchdowns are good things!”

It was both frustrating and puzzling. I looked three times in the bread box, twice in the refrigerator and several times in the bathroom, but I could not find that partial loaf of bread anywhere.

I knew I had put it on the counter. The trouble is, I have found things that I knew I had set on the counter in such places as the bedroom dresser, behind the television in the living room and inside the dryer(don’t ask). I know it is possible for me to hold something in my hand that I intended to put in a particular place and have it never reach that spot. Instead it will end up in some bizarre place and I can’t begin to explain why I put it there.

I know what you’re thinking by now, “Oh, the poor woman, she’s developing Alzheimer’s Disease.” (I hope I spelled that right…I can never remember how to spell the disease that describes losing the memory). You might be right, except that means I have been developing this disease since I was very young.

I honestly believe that instead of suffering with this heartbreaking memory loss, I am suffering from something that I like to call “I put it where it belongs, but the darn Gremlins keep moving it.” When my daughters were young, I used to be able to blame them when the newspaper ended up in the silverware drawer or the roll of toilet paper I intended to put on the holder ended up stashed in the pan cupboard.

Now, my daughters are grown and the only time I can blame someone else for moving things is when my grandsons come to visit.  They aren’t too bad, but the little stinkers are always leaving their coffee cups in some weird place.

Okay, okay, so it’s my fault that things are misplaced. It’s not REALLY my fault though. Can I be blamed when I am set to pour myself a glass of milk and suddenly the phone rings and when I finished listening to the riveting canned tirade by some candidate, I’ve completely forgotten the milk? So as I wander away, contemplating the political ruin of our nation, I have not a thought for the slowly curdling dairy product on the counter. More than one container of milk has hit the trash as a stinking, chunky mess in just such an encounter.

Now, what got me started on this line of thought? Oh, yes, I remember. Back to the missing bread. Now, the one thing you must know is that once I start looking for the lost, misplaced or forgotten item, I always find it. I have to get pretty creative sometimes in figuring out where it is, and I have a whole list of unlikely places to search, but I always get it back. Not so the bread.

I began looking in some VERY unlikely places. I inspected the inside of my footstool in the living room—sometimes I hide things from the dog there. I checked the car in the garage, because I had taken some things out there for school. In complete desperation I checked under the bed in the spare bedroom—it would take too long to explain why I chose to look there. However, suffice it to say there was no bread there, but when I remember it again, I’m going to need to take a dust mop to that incredibly dirty floor!

I was in despair. It wasn’t even that I wanted some bread, it was just that I KNEW I had put that bread on the counter and now it was gone. My lucky knack of finding things that I mislaid had finally let me down. Roy walked into the kitchen while I was standing in the middle of the floor, looking dejected.

“What’s the problem?” he wanted to know.

“I think I’m really losing it,” I answered sadly. “I had a partial loaf of bread; I was sure I put it on the counter and now I can’t find what I did with it.”

“Oh, that bread that was on the counter?” he waved a hand carelessly, “I thought that was spoiled, so I threw it in the garbage.”

The garbage. Great, now I have a new unlikely place to look when I’m missing something!

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

I have mentioned before that I am a skilled professional when it comes to worry. Let me give you a small sample of how well I can worry. If you saw the first of the new Star Trek movies (and I’m a big fan), Chris Pine as a young James T. Kirk, arrives at the induction center for Star Fleet on a motorcycle. A passing worker admires the bike and so “Kirk” tosses him the keys and says, “It’s yours.” Really nice, right? Well, I have been worrying for years since that came out: how in the world did that worker ever drive that motorcycle when he didn’t have the title to it? I mean, did he just store it in the garage and admire it or did he run the risk of being caught on a motorcycle with no clear title? These things worry me.

That being the case, it’s a sure bet that any type of medical exam can put my worrying meter into overdrive. Especially since medical personnel, whether they are for the body, the teeth or even the eyes, feel compelled to explain what they are about to do…in worrisome detail.

I was thinking about this during an eye exam this week. The young assistant held up a wicked-looking device that kind of resembled a pipe wrench and announced, “Now, I need you to hold open your eye as wide as you can so I can tap the eyeball with the machine.”

My first reaction to that announcement was to take off my glasses, squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I could and cover them with my hand! The term “tap the eyeball” is not a good one for a woman like me who doesn’t wear contacts because I can’t touch my eye to put them in. Although I tried to hold my eye open, my eyelid was quicker than their machine every time. So the doctor decided they would try it a different way. “Now, I’m going to use a light to measure that eye pressure,” he told me. “But I need to put in these eye drops. Please hold your eye wide open so I can drop them in.”

A dentist is nearly as bad. They want to check those teeth and the wider you can open your mouth, the better. “I’m going to tilt the chair up so I can work on the underside of that tooth,” he will announce. What he doesn’t realize is that I have a problem with being upside down. I’m holding on to the chair, hanging my head down, trying to remember to hold my mouth open while he is saying things like, “I’m just going to give this tooth you say is sore a little tap. Tell me when it hurts.” Would snapping my jaws shut on his fingers be enough of an indication, do you think?

And of course, both the dentist and the doctor are masters of the shot. “I’m just going to thrust this needle up your nose and give you a shot. There will be a little sting.” Having a baby was a “little sting” compared to a shot up the nose!

By far the worst physical exam for a worrier like me is the colonoscopy. What a great procedure. “In preparation for this procedure, we would like you to drink this vile-tasting laxative in about a gallon of Gatorade. This will ‘cleanse the colon.” You know what they mean by that? They mean that you will defecate so much and so violently in so short a time that it will eventually drain from you in a liquid form which is unstoppable and will cause you to live on the toilet.

Now, when you’re done “cleansing the colon,” that is when the fun really begins. “We are now going to take this tiny camera on a stick and shove it up the bottom to look inside your colon.” I’ve been through this procedure. As horrible as the camera sounds, I can tell you that the preoperative poop fest is actually worse. And of course, when it’s over, they want to show you photos of the inside of your colon. I have never been curious as to what that looks like!

So maybe when I think about it, the whole “tapping the eyeball” really doesn’t sound that bad. It’s certainly a lot less worrisome than a camera which goes where no camera has been before. And that reminds me,  I still can’t stop worrying about what that Star Fleet worker is doing with the bike for which he has no title. It’s a stressful world!

I believe I have mentioned that I’m not exactly a clothes horse when it comes to high fashion. I have always gone with the theory that what I’m going to wear depends on what I have in the closet. I don’t care about matching or coordinates or what colors are most fashionable. I’m okay with all this. Those who have to look at me, however, have a bit of a different opinion.

I try always to sneak out and buy my clothes on my own. I might snag an unimaginative pair of black trousers on the sly or a new blouse of lovely shades of…tan, maybe. Usually I look at bargain racks only when I shop alone because I like to think that bargain racks are just what someone not of my size and taste in clothes left behind for me to buy! After all, someone has to buy the blouse with the peculiarly shaped violet flowers and the odd pleats in the back, don’t they?

So I should have seriously known better than to go shopping with two of my cousins who DO have some fashion sense…but I didn’t. Kristi and Gail both voiced the intention of doing a little clothes shopping, so I went along.

Kristi started it. I was busily perusing a rack in one corner featuring bland blouses and tepid trousers, all marked down, when she walked up.

“Look at this beautiful shirt,” she was holding up a frothy white blouse with beautiful blue trimmings in it.

“That’s beautiful,” I agreed. “But it’s much too large for you. That’s not your size.”

“No,” she responded, taking me by the arm and walking me towards the dressing room, “It’s YOUR size.”

Very well. I could try on the blouse just to make her happy. I wouldn’t have to actually buy it, right? I got into the fitting booth and did you know those things have an open top? I had never really appreciated that before, but I did on that day.

I noticed because before I had a chance to try on the first blouse, Gail had knocked on the fitting room door. “I found this really cute top on the bargain rack,” she announced and the blouse came flying over the door.

From then on, it was as though clothes were snowing in on my fitting room, blowing in over the top of the door. I was trying on more clothes than I could possibly afford or ever find the time to wear. I kept thinking the clerk would announce that we could only have so many shirts in the fitting room at a time, but when she finally knocked on the door it was to say, “Ma’am, your cousins sent me in with these zipper shirts; would you like black, blue or red or maybe all three?”

Watching them when I walked out to model anything was pretty entertaining. If they reared back, nodding slightly with a rather smug look on their faces, I knew that meant, “Oh, yeah, I was right. She can wear red without spontaneously combusting.”

If they were to purse up their lips and twist their facial features, I would be able to interpret that too. They were thinking, “Okay, that one looks like something she would choose. It has to go.”

At the end of the shopping excursion after having tried on enough clothing to cover the poor in a small country, I finally found a selection of clothes that only set me back about two weeks’ worth of groceries.

As we were leaving, I looked over the top of my many packages at my cousins. “What do you guys buy?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, we’ll go back later to get ours,” they said, avoiding each other’s guilty looks.

“Right,” I said. It’s okay, though; I’ll get even. When I get home, I’m going to dye all these colorful clothes tan!

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

I love that new animated movie “The Secret Lives of Pets.” I wanted to see it so desperately that I made my husband take me…without any kids for cover. He wanted to rent a couple of fresh faced kiddos to make it look like we weren’t just going to that movie ourselves, but I made him go without an age escort.

It may have been an error, though. Because now I think he’s beginning to wonder what I do all day long on my summer break. He leaves the house for work each day just like the owners of the pets in the movies and then the pets get into all kinds of trouble all day instead of accomplishing anything.

Since we went to the movie, he’s been questioning me rather closely on my activities during the day. Now, this is bad, because not all of my activities in a day could be termed as “useful.”

He went to work one morning, inviting me to have a good day and adding, “There are some clothes that need washing and a couple of things to be straightened up in the family room. I presume you’re getting up now?”

“You bet,” I say, rolling over and burying my face in the pillow on the bed. “Anytime now.”

He has no choice but to leave it at that…after all, he can’t be late for work. But I know the inquisition as to what I have been doing will come when he gets home. I must in some fashion be ready for that.

That night, sure enough, the first thing he did when he came in the door was to ask, “Did you get those clothes washed?”

“Well, I started to, but I was interrupted and never got back to it,” I answered reluctantly.

“What interrupted you?”

“Well, I sat down for a few minutes and went to sleep,” I told him, “but I was just so tired from all the cleaning I did.”

“Oh, you did some cleaning?” he said, sounding more impressed.

“Yes, I cleaned the floor,” I said. “It was all sticky from the pop I spilled.”

“How did you spill pop on the floor?” he was suspicious again.

“I spilled it while chasing the dog,” I tried to explain.

“And why were you chasing the dog?”

“Because I had taken out my partial and when I looked down at her, she was wearing it in her teeth,” I answered. “And of course, after I cleaned the floor, it was necessary to spend a couple of hours sterilizing my partial.”

“So after that, you couldn’t get back to the laundry?”

“Absolutely, that’s just what I intended to do,” I hesitated.

“But?”

“Well, I was kind of tired after chasing the dog and cleaning the floor, so….”

“So you took another nap,” he shook his head as he walked away.

Now he’s a bigger believer in the secret life of deadbeats than ever before. And I’m so tired from trying to convince him otherwise, that I need another nap!

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.