Weblog
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
-
Merry Coffee Day!
That's right.
There could have been a 2007 Mustang GT waiting outside in the snowy Denver morning for me, and it would still be secondary to my first Christmas gift: a cup of coffee.
Coffee is so ubiquitous in our culture that we all take it for granted, whether we're drinkers or not. Local Starbucks were even open today (were they everywhere?) Anyone who knows me knows that I am quite the coffee drinker. A minimum of a pint a day-- two if I'm home on a weekend. I like it warm and black. That's right, black. Opaque black, but clearer than crude oil. No form of creamer or sweetner. Certainly no nonfat half-caf extra hot light foam double latte. Just good old-fashioned black COFFEE please.
Anyhow, on November 15, I got a flu shot. I promptly got sick-- first with, well, flu-like symptoms. The next week, it turned into bronchitis. Eventually, a sinus infection developed on top of the bronchitis. I never actually saw the doctor-- I have Kaiser Permanente and, if you're familiar with them, their standard procedure is: 1) Call the main number, 2) Push the appropriate sequence of buttons, 3) Eventually talk to a real person, to whom you detail your symptoms, 4) 3-4 hours later (on a good day), a nurse from your physician's office will call, 5) if possible, they will avoid scheduling an actual in-person appointment, and instead, will assess what you say and call in a prescription for you.
That's all well and good, because if your malady in viral in nature, antibiotics aren't going to help, and all you can do is take over-the-counter medications to alleviate the symptoms (but not provide any cure), drink plenty of fluids and get lots of rest, which, if you work full-time and have kids at home, is essentially impossible.
On December 3, we talked to the doctor again (well, my wife did-- while I was at school) and he said, yes, this crud is going around, and it takes 4-6 weeks to get over.
Four... to... six... WEEKS. That's how long something you order from TV is supposed to take to arrive-- not how long you're supposed to keep hacking up mucus from your lungs (and of course, examining its hue... flourescent yellow? yellow-brown like spicy mustard?)
On that day, Doc said the usual: keep taking Mucinex to loosen the mucus, Robitussin for the cough, drink plenty of fluids to thin the mucus... mainly water. NO COFFEE. Herbal teas were good, green tea still OK, but absolutely NO COFFEE-- it has a dehydrating effect, pretty much the opposite of water.
Obviously, that's not what I wanted to hear. Reluctantly, I agreed to go cold turkey from coffee until I got better. Maria made me agree to Christmas Day as the target date. So, I kept drinking green tea, especially in the mornings, as it provided a modicum of caffeine (though far less than even cola)-- and lots of water (or tried to).
So you can only imagine my excitement this morning when Coffee Day had arrived. I had a bag of whole-bean Starbucks Christmas Blend I received from a student, I retrieved my Mr. Coffee grinder that I got my first Christmas here, five years ago, ground it up, scooped it into the filter basket, filled my Hamilton Beach BrewStation with an Eddie Bauer bottleful of cold, double-filtered water (approximately 36 oz.), and pressed that power button for the first time in over three weeks.
Nirvana.
I wish my powers of written articulation, my command of the English language, my voracity for vocabulary, my sense for semantics, could adequately describe the sensation of that first sip. I don't think Shakespeare himself could manage it; then again, ol' Will died a few years too soon to savor the New World wonder of coffee.
Shame for him. Hamlet would have agonized far less had he enjoyed a cup or two.
I'm still sick-- the sinus pressure is causing pain behind my ears, and the coughing is far more occasional, but still produces some pretty stuff. Maria has since become far more sick, catching everything I had, and then the flu on top of it. Still, we and our family had a wonderful Christmas, and I hope you did too.
Merry Coffee Day-- and to all, a good night!
Sunday, December 23, 2007
-
The Seven-Year Itch
Unbelievably, today marks seven years since I first signed up with Xanga. Lucky seven. Store seven years of grain for seven years of famine. In Internet time, that's an eternity. In 2000, no one imagined anything online lasting for seven years... Yahoo! wasn't even that old then.
It was quite a different time for me then. I was a graduate student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, pursuing a Master of Arts degree in English Literature. Thus my choice of screen name, "litboiler"-- literature + Boilermaker (the Purdue nickname). I was single-- well, a long way from married, anyway-- and living in a dorm room in Young Graduate House. Now, I am a middle school teacher, husband, adoptive father of a teenage girl and stepfather to three more, living in my mother-in-law's tri-level, four-bedroom house in a suburb of Denver, Colorado.
I've also changed my Xanga identity a few times since then, from "litboiler" to "enigma42," back to "litboiler," then to "education_is_life" and finally "jasonwrites" The current name serves well because it applies no matter what my life situation may be. I've tried blogging elsewhere also. Problem is, much of what I want to write now is potentially troublesome for me if it were read by the people I work for, with, or may work for in the future. So if I'm to stick around here, I'll have to make some of my posts protected.
There's so much more I want to write about, but let me put this out here for my anniversary post. Now that I'm on winter break, more will come this week.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
-
On Vacation... Come Visit!
So, I finally finished my first year of teaching and proud to say I survived, if not thrived. I've taken time to get back to blogging-- not here, but over at my Wordpress site. Come visit!
Monday, January 22, 2007
-
Playing Hookey
Well, that resolution's definitely down the drain.
I don't want to take what's left of my dreams and dash them against the rocks of real life. If I'm ever to be a writer, I have to write. But I may need to concede that it can't be in a public forum, not on a regular basis anyway. Notebooks and journals and the backs of store receipts and even my left hand work as well.
I'm playing hookey today because I had a bad feeling about driving to work on the snow/ice-packed roads resulting from our fifth winter storm of the season this weekend. It wasn't quite clear enough to qualify as a premonition, but it was definitely a feeling. I feel like I have to justify myself. The three days (two personal, one sick) that were originally to be used for our Christmas trip are credited back to me because the district was closed all three of those days, during the first blizzard. So, I felt it was OK to take a sick day this month and here we are. I'm just glad I work at a school where subs will come in on short notice. I think my plans are straightforward and easily manageable today, so I'm not really concerned, but I always feel a twinge of guilt when I'm not there and my students are.
Then again, it will give me a perfect opportunity to read this poem tomorrow.
Besides, it's most likely that I won't be back in this district next year, so I might as well use the days I have available. That's because it's most likely I won't still be in this state next year. No worries, the family's coming with me. The rest is a long story.
Having lived for some 16 months of my life in northwestern Indiana, a third of the way up I-65 from Indianapolis to Chicago, I'm glad to see those two cities' teams matched in the Super Bowl. A Midwestern dream, to be played out in south Florida. The Saints will come back strong, no doubt drubbing my Falcons twice again next season. And the Patriots... my principal may be a diehard fan (he wrote in an e-mail that he "needs counseling" today), but haven't they had enough success lately? Time to share.
It will probably be Super Bowl time when I post again, so here's to a great remainder of January for all.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
-
Airport Adventures, Part II
I really didn't break my resolution... I wrote, but Xanga wouldn't let me post Tuesday. Yesterday I got this written, but ran out of time to add the photos. Let's see if it cooperates today...It's been a while since I first recounted how we got stranded at Denver International Airport. We spent that night (Wednesday the 20th) making the most of the "accommodations." We didn't get a cot, but we did secure three seats in a row of six facing the International Arrivals concourse. The other three seats were occupied by Jeff, Gene, and George, our new friends. We managed to get a hold of three complimentary "blankets" which were more like microfiber sheets and which, in terms of size, would only qualify as blankets to children under ten. I vacillated as to whether to try sleeping in the chair or on the floor. Concluding that a prone position was requisite for slumber, I claimed a small patch of carpeted real estate, laid down one blanket, and positioned myself between it and another, with my messenger bag-- my single carry-on-- as a pillow. Ah, I don't think I mentioned that before. As we had already checked our baggage before arriving on the concourse to find our flight cancelled, United Airlines kindly informed us that we couldn't reclaim it; it would go out on the first available flight to Atlanta, even if we weren't going with it.
(left) some of the 5,000 stranded travelers Wednesday afternoon; (right) although UAL did not allow baggage reclaiming, Frontier did-- here's one of the areas where they stockpiled)It was shortly after 9 p.m. when I settled in, as I laid there reading my book. I finally fell asleep and woke up sometime after midnight. I was cold, too cold to remain on the floor. No doubt, it had something to do with the fact that despite blizzard conditions outside, they were running the air conditioning in the terminal building. So I returned to my seat, inbetween Maria and Dora. We all managed to sleep, off and on, by using one another as headrests-- which worked fine, of course, until any one of us moved.
here's the wall we were facing in our seats-- and a couple of folks trying to catch some winks on cold, hard floor (but the Native American artwork is cool, eh?)
Eventually morning came, and Ria and I went off on a mission to get breakfast. The people I felt sorriest for in this whole situation were employees at the airport, particularly at restaurants, concessions, and retail stores. They were just as stuck there as we were, and that meant that many of them just kept working, some for 20-hour shifts or more. We visited the Burger King upstairs, who only had one item available to serve (despite displaying the full menu, and posting no sign to the contrary) and had one individual barking this fact at people. The coffee was cold, as well. I didn't whine and was honestly grateful for what was available; it just would have been kind for them to be upfront with people and realize that we were all stuck in the same situation. We (meaning the collective thousands of stranded travelers) didn't need the barking treatment at 6 a.m.Maria's friend Vanessa had offered to come get us, but she called around 11 a.m. to say that they couldn't possibly get out either. Few could. Most of metro Denver residents were literally snowbound. Two feet or more had fallen in less than 24 hours across the region. RTD (public transportation) wasn't running. Taxicabs came roughly every four hours. The airport made deals with downtown hotels (10 miles or more from the airport) to accommodate some of the stranded and later RTD also got involved by providing busses as hotel shuttles. Unfortunately for most of us in the unwashed masses, most hotels in downtown Denver are in the four- or five-star variety and charge $300 or more per night.We somehow passed the time, chatting with our new friends, walking around the airport (they finally re-opened the concourses). When the other gentlemen's cot was free, I napped a couple of times. I must admit, I wanted to just go home. Badly. The prospect of spending another night there was unpleasant, if not intolerable.Sometime around five that afternoon (Thursday), George's brother told him he could get out and come get him. He (the brother) lives pretty close to our house, and when George asked, he offered to take the three of us as well. It was the best news I'd heard since the previous morning-- which at that point felt like a week before. It was a long trip home-- a normal 25-minute drive that took over an hour. But finally, there we were. We walked back into our house almost 36 hours after we had left it the morning before.The next morning (Friday) I felt flu-ish, and Maria declined my offer to help her shovel snow. Instead, I slept nearly the entire day and night; it's all my body would let me do. Meanwhile, DIA officially reopened at noon Friday, but with only two of the six runways available. Saturday dawned and we all felt better. Our flight had been rebooked for 7:05 p.m. that night. We left for the airport at two, scared of the massive lines we had seen on television news reports ever since we'd been home. Our drive there was, obviously, much easier than Wednesday morning's.
behind the back of this UAL jet, a massive snowblower creates a veritable geyser of snow clearing from the taxiways as the sun sets SaturdayBut the long lines didn't deter us, because we didn't have to stand in them. We'd been rebooked into first class, and that meant bypassing the main check-in line, and the main security line. I felt like a rock star. Unsurprisingly, almost every flight was delayed, including ours. It didn't actually lift off the ground until just after 10 p.m.-- midnight Atlanta time. We landed around 2:45 a.m. EST. Fortunately, my brother John didn't have a problem with picking us up at that hour. It was nearly 4 when we got to my mother's house, and about 6 a.m., on the morning of Christmas Eve, when we finally got to sleep.To be continued (still)...
LifetimeConnect
Here's your sign
About Me
-
The Xangan formerly known as litboiler. I am married to a truly wonderful woman who you can find here under the name maria_joy. Upon marrying her in October 2003, I "inherited" four wonderful kids, the oldest of whom I adopted in September 2005, and the younger three I am proud to call my stepchildren. I recently completed my first full year of teaching middle school and-- I'll be returning for my second; that should say enough.
Chatboard (7)