Thursday, November 12, 2009

What Day Is It Again?

I am so confused about what day it is. Rob was away last weekend, making it feel non-weekend-y, and then he stayed home for a day after getting back from his conference in Miami, making that feel very weekend-esque despite the fact that it was a Wednesday. Now I am all discombobulated, but very happy to be all back together.

Grace and I got sick while Rob was away, and I was again reminded that being the sole caretaker for two small children while feeling sick is a special kind of miserable. The kind where you don't really get to take a nap and yet your child still ends up watching too much TV. (Grace's favorites right now are Ni Hao, Kai-Lan and Little Bill; I have had the song from that first one stuck in my head for several days now.) I wasn't all that sick, thank goodness. Every illness I have had in the last year has seemed not too dreadful because I mentally compare it to that killer UTI I got at the very end of being pregnant with Violet and I always think, "Well, this really isn't that bad." I think that might be the most violently ill I have ever been in my life, with the runner-up being a vicious case of food poisoning I had in Bukhara that commenced with me throwing up outside an 800-year-old mosque. Good times!

Whenever I am sick with the common-cold-respiratory-virus kind of illness, I always want pho. It is the perfect comfort food for when you are sick, like chicken noodle soup but way, way better. The yummy noodles and nourishing broth and delicious aromatic chiles and basil and cilantro and lime-- I wanted some SO BADLY when I was sick but could not see myself packing up both children and making it to a restaurant by myself. I finally satisfied my pho craving yesterday when Rob took me and Violet out to lunch while Grace was at preschool. (Shhhh, don't tell her we went to a restaurant without her; she'll be mad.) I was already getting better but between the pho and the nap I got to take yesterday afternoon while Rob was home, I am now definitely on the mend.

Something else around our house seems to be acting sick-- my precious, precious serger. Noooooo! I sew a lot (although you'd never know it by my recent lack of reviewing on Pattern Review), mostly clothes for the girls and me. I have a regular sewing machine (my college graduation present from my parents) and this serger (a Christmas gift from Rob a few years back) and both of them are very robust, well-behaved machines. Neither of them have ever been persnickety or difficult to work with, but I moved the serger to clean under it a few days ago and ever since the thread tensions have been all messed up. I've re-threaded the thing several times and dug out my manual but cannot figure out what the problem is. I've decided to give it some time to itself to let it think about what it's done and if it wants to make good choices. I have put my serger in time-out. I am hoping against hope that the next time I turn it on it will have magically gotten better and/or have thought better of its perverse behavior and returned to its obliging ways. This is my favorite method of dealing with problems-- DENIAL! and IGNORING THE ISSUE! Let's hope it serves me well.

3 comments:

amydove said...

After seeing your updates on twitter I have been thinking of you and hoping you'd get better. I can't even imagine having to take care of two kids while sick! Glad that all is getting back to normal now. And here's hoping your serger repents for its misbehavior.

Kris C. said...

Oh, bummer! I feel your pain on the serger. Mine has to go visit the serger doctor, just as soon as I call to talk to someone about it. In the meantime, I'm trying to remember how I sewed without one!

Kimberly said...

I have never tried Pho, but after your description, I might have to find some.