the trick is to keep breathing

My body's still busted up.

I've been fighting bronchitis for two weeks now. Some of it is my fault: I came down with it the week the Japanese Overlords were here, so I really didn't want to take sick time off of work and leave my discussions and presentations to someone else; I ended up just taking a lot of drugs and cough drops. I'm also dumb because I continued to run and work out for the first week because I don't like admitting defeat to my own body. When it didn't start to clear up on its own I went to a CVS MinuteClinic and got me some drugs for it, but I think working/working out through it has aggravated it and made it worse. That's mostly my own stupidity, and I probably deserve it, but the bronchitis just had particularly bad timing this year.

I haven't done any kind of cardio (running, swimming, or elliptical) in a week, and I haven't even done weights since last Friday. I've also been sleeping like a goddamned fiend - last Thursday I took the afternoon off sick, took a 4-hour nap, got up and ate and read a little, and basically went back to bed and slept for 10 hours - so it isn't like my body doesn't know something's wrong. I pretty much slept away the entire fucking weekend. At this point I'll probably just rest right on through to the Marathon Relay on Saturday, other than PT today. It's going to be a pretty horrible race for me. :/ I'm sure it will be fun hanging out with everyone, but I'm really just not looking forward to the running bit.

PT doesn't seem to be doing much yet. Every time I seem to think things are improving, it then gets worse. I know from experience that this unidentified friend in my neck works in horrible synergy with the rest of me - so when I'm sick, or when I have really bad insomnia, it's way worse - so for now I don't know whether my bronchitis is compounding the issue by way of general aches and pains, or if it's actually worsening. I just -- I thought PT was supposed to provide some kind of relief (as well as fixing what's broke)? Other than the traction machine (which I may actually propose to) it doesn't really seem to do much in terms of relief.

I just get really depressed when I constantly feel like shit. (surprise, feeling like shit makes you feel like shit?)

I'm really ready to not be coughing and dizzy all the time, and I'm super ready to not have constant pain in my neck/shoulders/back. :/

In marginally less whiny news:

• I've contacted my advisor, I'm trying to pick up my literature search again, and I'll hopefully talk to her and go to some group meetings this month :/ (file under: other things I am not excited about)


• This weekend I somehow managed to pull together a decently respectable Terra costume for NYCC. There's still plenty of things which can be done with it, but it's more or less going a lot better than I expected. It would be nice to have one 'constant' cosplay that I can wear wherever. (file under: upcoming nyc drunk vacation)


• I'm almost finished with a stupid scarf I've been working on for like a year (I lost the pattern okay .___. ) and I have lots of epic plans for scarves and cowls and hats and fun things to knit for the winter. (file under: things i will not end up doing)


• Work is somewhat in a lull right now, which is both nice and epically worrisome. No further developments there right now.

I'm trying to at least enjoy the weather. Autumn is my favorite season, and I love that it's colder out. I love the way the air smells, and I love the colors that are coming out. I just wish I felt better to enjoy it. :/

[edit] also I dyed my hair red. and that's really about it.

Today:

• I woke up late, which is surprising, and scrambled to get my lab printed out and things together and cats fed and on the road in the snow with enough food to last through until 6pm -- only to find when I got to campus that UAkron had closed for snow for the day.
  Now, when I went into my UAkron email folder, I did see the notice. But you know what? UAkron sends out emails like every day, I do not read them all, it is like the worst spam I cannot unsubscribe from. And I did not think the roads were that bad, I have driven through worse this season. I did not even think to look.
  So: no lab.


• I went to the gym and ran 6.7 miles. Ran at about a 10:50/mile pace. I did feel like I could have gone faster, and I felt like I could have done more, but the goal is to stay healthy and uninjured so I kept the speed down and kept to my plan on mileage. It was a pretty good run overall. I need to work on getting my cadence faster; a lot of the stuff I'm reading talks about a cadence of ~180 (~90 per foot) and my cadence right now is like 79 (160). I need to take shorter strides to be more efficient. It's hard to train yourself to do that though.


• I ate an entire Subway $5 Footlong and an entire box of vegetable lo mein. I have also drank like 20 glasses of water. Blaming the run, dude, blaming the run.


• Tested out John Freida 3-Day Straight spray on my hair - it's supposed to be a semipermanent relaxer that makes your straightening last for three days. I look pretty fab, sitting here with my laptop gorging on lo mein and possibly in my pajamas.


• I have been waiting to take my antibiotic, hoping that it will again make me pass out but this time maybe closer to bedtime? Yes, I am using this antibiotic as a sleeping pill, I think my body is officially broken as of right now.


• I really don't feel like working. I'm staring at the lab data and feeling rather braindead. Today was kind of surreal in not having lab, really, it was like I didn't even know what to do with all this time. Like, is this how much time normal people have? I kind of boggled.


• God I am still hungry. WTF.

This is a pretty frivolous entry!

+ dumbdailypoll, as always.

+ I think I've officially given up on NaNo. Last week was too busy at work, and this weekend was just too busy overall: I'm at 20,712 and I should be at 38,641 to be "on schedule". I only have 6 days left to write. To get it done I would have to write 4,881 words per day; I've only written that many wpd once, and it was a weekend when I did nothing else.

Le sigh. I was really hoping that this could be the year I'd be able to make 50K WITH the vacation handicap. Turns out that 8 days'-worth of writing is a lot! Dammit all, guys. I hate that I look like a loser. I can't write on the NaNo website "I took an 8-day vacation the past three years" so I just look like I keep failing at it, again and again. Insert unhappy face.

I'm going to keep writing this week; my new goal is to hit 36,667, which is what a "normal NaNo" participant "should" have in 22 days. I don't think I'm going to make that either, but it makes me feel a little better about the whole thing. >.> My REAL goal is going to be just 50% completion, which is only 5,000 words away.

+ The consolation prize for losing at NaNo is that I finally have a spot in the garage! Goldbug is so, so pleased! I WILL FINALLY BE PARKED OUT OF THE SNOW. This is awesome!

+ I GOT PRESENTS! Tons of books (too many!!) from shanaqui, and High School Musical from katmillia! I AM SO EXCITED IT IS LIKE CHRISTMAS HAS COME SUPER EARLY. I can read the books on vacation, and watch the movie when I come home and am uber-depressed! YAYAYAY. You guys rule! ♥!

+ Part of the reason I didn't write was because I went to play Secret of Mana with hilldo on Friday. It was awesome, although certain people were butts and we didn't get to play for as long as I would have liked. That game is really pretty awesome, I'd forgotten. It's funny how much of the story I don't remember (aka all of it) because I was too young to pay attention to shit like that. XD

+ We really got a lot done this weekend, so even though I fail at 50,000 words, I can look back and be proud of how much crap we did. Productive weekends ahoy! We got a lot of errands done, did cleaning, transferred our beer from the primary to the secondary fermenter, worked out twice, and made a lot of tasty food.

+ I have discovered the way to stay warm while sleeping, and it is long johns. If you are safety_caesars, hilldo, or jennyclarinet you should be laughing right now as you should realize where I got the women's longjohns from. If you did not make it to the Halloween Party this year I will merely direct you to this image and let you put the pieces together yourself.

How have I missed out on this?!! I wore pajama pants to bed, but I hate the way they bunch up and ride up your legs and get tangled. So I tried sleeping in girly-boxer shorts, but I WAS SO FREAKING COLD. Longjohns are the solution! I am warm, but they stay on my legs! I WIN.

+ In an update of Sev Vs Her Hair, Round 3: I got a haircut. It isn't anything drastic -- I just got an overall trim, and trimmed my bottom layers short because I am trying to grow out the layers completely: I look like I've got a kind of shaggy bob thing going on. It's alright.

The lady gave me some advice on it: namely, to try to work with my waves. Ever since I declared war on my hair and started using "repairing" products, my hair has picked up a lot of curl, especially on the right hand side (I have one big, fat, pretty ringlet that would be really nice-looking if it weren't the only one). This is okay when my hair is air-drying, but on mornings when I showered the night before because I hit the gym, I don't know what to do with it. Except put it up, but... she also said that wearing ponytails so often is tearing my hair, which contributes to my general frizz and ugly-hair-ness (which is what I am trying to combat with the Strength and Repair stuff in the first place!). Augh. No ponytails? Really?

I look like blech today. THE BATTLE CONTINUES.

+ Work has not calmed down, in the slightest. The consolation prize is that at least I am done making slides. The booby prize is that now that I've presented the slides, I've been given like 50lb MORE work to do. D:

+ It snowed yesterday! There was white on the ground last night! I know eventually I will be hating on the snow, so for right now I want to enjoy how beautiful it is. ♥

So, F-List, how was your weekend?