Just Checking In

How are everybody’s holidays so far? Both the missus and I have the week off, so I’ve been taking it pretty easy. Yesterday I came down with a cold. It started off as a mild sore throat which gradually worsened. By the time I went to bed, I had a throbbing headache, my joints were all achy and it was painful to swallow. I finally fell asleep sometime after midnight and had a series of fever dreams — you know, those bizarre dreams you get when you’re sick that are never restful and make even less sense than ordinary dreams. All last night I felt I was working out a problem that could never be solved — it just went on and on in a continuous loop. Every two hours I woke up with my head pounding; finally, at 5am, I got up and took some aspirin, which seemed to help.

I don’t get sick very often. As a matter of fact, I almost escaped all of 2005 without ever having a cold. The last malady of this sort occurred exactly a year ago. Here’s a bit of old fashioned Schprock wisdom: unless you’re completely incapacitated, the best thing you can do in the grip of an illness is to drag yourself out of bed, take a shower and put on regular clothes. Something about that seems to take the edge off of whatever cold or flu you’re suffering. Try it next time and tell me if I’m not right. It so happened I had an 8:30 doctor’s appointment this morning for my knee, so I had a reason to get up at a reasonable hour and function (believe it or not, I actually considered canceling a doctor’s appointment due to illness!). As rough as I felt when I first arose, a shower seemed to do wonders.

We had a very nice Christmas. The entire clan gathered at my sister’s house — there were 17 of us! My sister specializes in family gatherings and this year she surpassed herself. The highlight was a Yankee gift swap, where we each contributed a wrapped gift costing no more than 15 dollars. Everyone drew numbers and then each, in his turn, selected a present. You had the choice of either keeping the present or exchanging it for one that had already been chosen and unwrapped. First the adults did it to show the kids how it was done, and then all the cousins and nieces and nephews had their own gift swap. Good fun.

Everybody have their New Year’s Eve plans all set? The Schprocks might do First Night in Boston. I think all the major cities have this now: you purchase a button which you wear on your coat, and this gains you admittance to all sorts of happenings. Concerts, theatrical productions, that sort of thing. There’ll be a parade and ice sculpture to look at. The whole thing ends with fireworks at midnight, at which point people will blow into their noisemakers and act like something marvelous just happened. Wow! We just went from 2005 to 2006! Everything is different now! Let’s get drunk and make some noise!


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