Friday, December 27, 2013

THE COCKROACH. Or: My thrilling bout with the flu

So a funny thing happened to me at the doctor's office yesterday...

I better back up and tell you why I was at the doctor's office first, though.

Let's just say that this has not been the best Christmas ever.

I got the flu on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve. Thanks, Santa, but could I get a refund for that one? I felt tired all day (especially since I had been gallivanting about till 2 a.m. and then slept past 11 a.m., which is very weird for me). By that night I was nauseous (no throwing up, thank goodness) and generally miserable. I spent Christmas Day mostly lying around feeling to ill to do much. My Christmas candy is as yet untouched. I had a pretty nasty fever too. The day seemed to drag on for a week.

Then yesterday I woke up to the worst neck cramps of my life. You know how sometimes you sleep on your neck wrong and it aches a bit when you wake up? Try that times, like, a million. It was AGONY. I couldn't turn my head, couldn't bend over, couldn't even sit up for very long. I couldn't get comfortable either, and I tried like five different pillows in various combinations.

Worse yet, it meant that I wasn't going to get to hang out with my friends this break! They go to different schools now, but we were going to get together at Izzy's cabin. Well, Izzy and Alkira are up at the cabin right now and I'm stuck back here, still with (I think) a slight fever. Am I bitter about this? Oh heck yes. Did I mention that I haven't seen either of them in over a month?

Anyway, back to the neck cramps...

Mom decided to take me to the doctor, just to make sure I didn't have meningitis or mono or something. So we get there and I am totally miserable. Try a thirty-minute car ride when you can't move your neck.

Anyway, I'm sitting on the medical table. Dr. Chapman and Mom and I chat for a few minutes, she asks me about symptoms and stuff. Then Dr. Chapman comes at me with a tongue depressor and a light thingy.

As she leaned towards me, I noticed that she was wearing some very pretty jewelry. Two necklaces, one of which was a golden chain with a green pendant. There seemed to be a big amber beetle-shaped brooch attached to it too.

And then the brooch stuck out a barbed leg and crawled onto her sweater.

I let out a shriek and jerked away. Dr. Chapman looked confused. (She thought I was scared of the tongue depressor.)

"THERE'S A HUGE BUG ON YOU!!!" I screamed.

The thing was enormous! Seriously, it must have been two or three inches long--at least!
Almost life size!
Then Dr. Chapman shrieked, dropped the tongue depressor and the light thingy, and started trying to get the bug (which she still hadn't seen) off. She accidentally got her necklace instead, which exploded, sending gold chain links everywhere. A couple of them landed on me, but I thought they were little pieces of bug and I screamed again.

She calmed down a bit, thinking it was gone.

I screamed again. "IT'S STILL THERE!" I yelled, scooching away. The thing had crawled onto her back!

Then Mom saw it (she thought I was hallucinating for a minute there). Showing incredible bravery, she grabbed the thing--with her bare hands-- and deposited it in the trash.

"It's going to get out!" I said.

Mom glanced into the trash can. "Should I kill it?" she asked. (It was a rather pretty bug.)

"YES!!!" screamed Dr. Chapman, so Mom squished it with the trash can liner.

We all spent the rest of the appointment recovering from that. On the bright side, it distracted me from my neck for a few minutes, if only by way of sheer terror. Have I mentioned that the bug was freaking huge?!

(The building was undergoing repairs, which is probably how the bug got it. If you were wondering. Oh, and I don't have meningitis or mono--just a random virus.)

So that was my wonderful Christmas. Hope yours was better :/ I'm on the mend now--my neck only hurts when I turn it. It's a lot better than yesterday.

Oh, and I was in a video, put together by the wonderful and utterly amazing Derek Landy!


Watch it AND part 2 here: http://dereklandy.blogspot.com/

Happy Holidays!

Monday, December 23, 2013

Merry Christmas, People!

Let's see, what have I been up to lately?

Well, I got a new haircut. Totally changed my hairstyle too. It's extremely short and it stands straight up in the mornings.

I can now pull off the mad scientist look. Yay.
(Yes, that's a bathrobe.)
The last couple weeks of school were insane. Seriously, I can't even function. I have sooo much AP English homework to do over break. O.O

I went to see Frozen on Thursday with my friend! (We got out on Thursday and had Friday off.) It was awesome! It's now quite possibly my favorite Disney movie ever.

My immediate reactions to it:

FINALLY!! A Disney movie that points out that you can't marry a guy you met that day! THANK YOU, DISNEY! 

The music was awesome, the animation (especially the snow) was beautiful, and aside from one or two cliched moments, I really liked the story.

So yeah. That happened.

I finally figured out how to do the spells on Pottermore. Yay!

Oh, and I went to a party last night. That was fun, but I ate too much too late and felt awful this morning. Good food, though.

Merry Christmas!


Thursday, December 5, 2013

Happy Thanksgiving! Well, it was a week ago, anyway...

It has been brought to my attention that I only update my blog about once a month.

Sorry about that. It's because I'm in high school and I have homework to do and YouTube videos to watch and stories to write and books to read and random stuff to draw. And also I can be kind of lazy on the writing front.

I'm setting a goal, as of right now, that I am going to do a blog post at LEAST every two weeks! If not every week! I am going to do this! It is a thing that I am going to do! Yay!

(Yeah, that'll totally happen...*can't keep a straight face*)

Although I will say that I'm doing all right so far. It's been slightly over a year since I started this blog. To be precise, it's been 378 days. I think. Ish? The first post was on November 23, 2012, so...378-ish days. And I have 38 posts published so far (this being the 38th), so that's actually a bit over one a month. Yay!

My Thanksgiving this year was decent. I got a few funny stories out of it, so here they are.

My dad's brother, Gregg, and his wife Coral came down from Sacramento and stayed in a hotel near us for a week. I was gone the first two days they were here, actually, on a retreat with my junior class. Ooh, maybe I should blog about that...it was pretty spectacular. It was an awesome overnight.

Anyway, on Thanksgiving my family piled into two cars to head up to my dad's cousin Paula's, just like last year. Only this time we had Gregg and Coral, so Dad and Gregg were in one car and Mom and Coral and I were in the other.

Mom and Coral and I got there fine. We got there at about the time we'd expected to get there (1:00-ish, if you were wondering). It turned out we were the first ones there. Dad and Gregg hadn't arrived yet, and neither had Ruth and Stewart, Paula's parents.

Well, Ruth and Stewart showed up pretty soon after that. Mom and I helped Paula with the mashed potatoes while Coral talked to them.

Half an hour later, we started wondering what had happened to Dad and Gregg. We knew they wouldn't starve, because they had the gluten-free dressing in their car, but I kept picturing the vultures circling a dusty Toyota parked next to a cactus in the desert.

Ten minutes after that, Mom's phone went off. It was Dad. He knew they were lost because the whole trip was supposed to be about 130 miles, and the odometer said 130 miles but they hadn't reached the exit yet.

Mom tried to give them directions, then gave up and handed them to Paula. Paula seemed to have a hard time figuring out exactly what had happened, but she eventually told them where to go and how to get there and hung up.

"They're halfway to Arizona,"she told us, shaking her head in despair. Apparently they missed the turnoff and wound up somewhere in the mountains. Brilliantly done, Dad. Brilliantly done. *Applause*

Dad and Gregg got there eventually, about an hour after they'd planned to. Just in time for lunch, actually. As we sat down at the table, I looked around and realized something.

I was literally the only person in the room without a subscription to AARP magazine.

Yay.

It was kind of a loud dinner. Not because there were a lot of people, but because Ruth and Stewart couldn't hear well and everything had to be repeated, twice, with gradually increasing volume. I said pretty much nothing and just let the adults talk. But the food was tasty and overall it was pleasant enough.

After lunch Paula dragged me over and gave me rather a lot of jewelry. She's been cleaning out her jewelry box for a while now, and since I like wearing interesting earrings and she wants to get rid of them, the arrangement works well. She sent me lots of stuff last Christmas too, including my all-time favorite pair of earrings ever. They're petrified wood and they look a bit like Nausicaa's in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. 

That movie has the best flying machines ever.
We drove back at around five and I fell asleep in the car. I was listening to that U2 album The Joshua Tree, because there were actual joshua trees all over the place and I just couldn't not listen to it. One minute the opening chords of "Red Hill Mining Town" are playing and the next I open my eyes and think, "What the heck happened to the song?" I looked at my iPod. For some reason it had gone back to the list of all the songs. Then I looked at the clock on the dashboard. I'd been out cold for an hour!

It was pretty uneventful after that. We just went home and had a light supper and then went to bed. We stayed inside for all of Black Friday, too. As someone who hates crowds and lines, Black Friday sounds quite a lot like the eleventh circle of Hell to me.


So now it's the holiday season and my school is beautiful. I love the giant Christmas tree.

Happy belated Thanksgiving/Hanukkah, and happy whatever-the-heck-you-celebrate-in-December!

(I will totally update again before Christmas...)