We don’t pull any punches on this site baby! We may embellish a few, or just plain make them up, but nothing gets pulled in MY HOUSE! I am of course not talking literally about my physical place of residence… a recent gallop poll of married Americans suggests that the average couple, married 5 years or longer, pulls approximately 154.2 out of an average 155 potential “punches” in any given hour together. This poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 40% (largely based on whether some household appliance is involved).

Nay, I speak of this site as my house – the domain over which I may exclusively rule. It is password protected, after all. Ah, but I digress damn near to the point of egress…

Heck, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah, I was talking about hell. “A state or place of great suffering, an unbearable experience.” That’s how my widget dictionary defines hell (well, it’s one of several definitions – this is the one without religious tie ins – I don’t want to be offending anyone, supernatural or otherwise, with my careless comparison of a cold to eternal damnation).

By Joe I think I’ve got it! I’ll call it a secular hell.

That pretty much sums up this week. It started late last week with Beth doing the kind of running Cheryl REALLY doesn’t like in the house, and loosing three pounds in the process. The good thing for Beth is that this little bug was just doing a test run on her. No, it appears that dear ole dad was the real target all along. I felt like someone was playing pin the symptom on the daddy. Fever, aches and pains, fever, sore throat, fever, nausea, fever, someone using my head as a speed bag, fever, someone using my sinus cavity as a concrete mold for a piece of abstract art… and fever.

The worst cold is when it gets you up at two in the morning. You’re lying there, incredibly uncomfortable, but it hurts way more to move… but, you move anyway. You get to the new position and it’s no better. You count to twenty groans and move again. Still no dice. You count twenty more groans, alternating silent explicatives (it requires too much energy to actually talk out loud), and repeat. After repeating this exercise a few times I typically fall into the dead man’s trance. This is when learned helplessness seeps in (there is no comfortable position), and I just lie in that last position staring at everything and nothing. This usually lasts until my subconscious does some crack math for me in the background, and alerts me that it’s time for another dose of the OTC (over the counter – drugs that is). It usually takes me about thirty minutes from that point to unlearn the learned helplessness, and to gather sufficient will to move. There’s a 50/50 chance I’ll trip over one of the kid’s toys on my pilgrimage to chemical Mecca, where I’ll find myself on the floor, and faced with another dilemma. Is it worth getting up again, or should I just lie on the floor for the night? You may think it’s a no-brainer, but after the struggle of getting up and unceremoniously dumping myself on my keester in the dark… the floor is feeling pretty good. Compromise was the name of the game on this night… I crawled. So yada yada yada, I got the medicine, yada yada yada, I went to bed, and yada yada yada, I got up the next morning.

The bottom line is I was sick all week. It was great fun. I’m feeling a little better, hence this entry, but I’m debating the great “work” debate. After a fever induced hazy week at home, I’m not sure I remember what it looks like anymore. Will I remember the code for the door? Will I remember where the door is? Maybe I should stay home one more day.