When Sinuses Attack

     Maybe it started yesterday at work -- in the afternoon, I was increasingly unsteady and unexpectedly sleepy.  Maybe it started that evening, when I was stumbling and sneezing.  At one point, I came a little too close to falling down the basement stairs, but caught myself just in time.

     Whatever.  I awoke in the night, as women past a certain age do, and once up and mission accomplished, my nose felt stuffy.  Cleared it, laid down -- and woke up fifteen minutes later from a dream about being in a shipwreck. My nose was bubbling like a percolator.  "Ah," think I, "My sinuses have cleared!"

     Yeah, no.  Did the obvious, went back to sleep and not a half-hour later, my spacesuit's got a bad rebreather valve, or at least it did until it woke me up and turned back into full sinuses.  And so it went.  After the fourth or fifth time, I gave up and stayed awake, tissues not far away.  I was kind of stumbling into doorways when I was getting up to clear my nose anyway.  That approach worked, or seemed to, until a sleepy and mildly irked Tamara appeared in my doorway to remark, "If you're going to sing, I'm going to give up on my last ten minutes of sleep and start my day."

     Had I been singing?  H'mmm.  Yes, I had.  And perhaps not softly. How does that happen?

     Survey says...  Fever!  This was confirmed fifteen minutes later, when I was making coffee and Tam was questioning the continued presence of a largish cardboard box in the kitchen.

     "Bobbi, what is even in this?  Can't we throw it out?"

     "Oh, I need to check it first."

     Tamara started to open the box.

     I warned her, "Oh, don't do that!  It's full of packing peanuts.  They get all over and you'll kill me!"  And I began to giggle.

     N.B., despite the provocation they present, Tam has never killed me or anyone over plastic packing peanuts.  I quite doubt she ever will.

    So yes, I'm unwell.  I'm going back to bed.