I can't think. Words. Words words words.
Yesterday was magazine deadline day. It's kind of like finals, only everyone will be reading your paper. It's kind of like grading, only you're grading authors' work that will appear in your publication, so the readers get to grade both of you.
I even tired of my trusty red correcting pen.
It was after seven in the evening when I dragged myself home to check in on the invalids. John and our houseguest, my brother Ethan, have both contracted something in between the bird flu and the plague. They're weak. They can't move. Yesterday their temperatures hit somewhere between molten lava and the surface of the sun. Coughing. Hacking. I dumped fluids down them, performing a pit-crew like series of actions - replacing their warm cloths on their heads with fresh freezer-ed ones (yes, yes, I literally bathed their fevered brows), annoying them with new things to drink every few seconds, forcing them to eat, and pushing Vitamin C pills down their throats. I toasted bread as an appetizer, given their nausea from taking medicine but not eating all day. I made lime jell-o and chocolate pudding from boxes.
Aside: Jello and pudding are underrated. Everyone loves them. They're a dollar a box, or less if you drive to Wal-Mart, which I didn't. They take little time to make. Why don't I more? Maybe I'll start.
And then I made what I had been dreaming about somewhere between the sixth and tenth revision of the Table of Contents page: lime chicken quesadillas. A refreshing change to the printed world of ink, words, typing, words, page numbers, and words. I didn't expect The Invalids to eat much, which was good, because they didn't. After cleaning up the kitchen (read: wiping off the stove and arranging the dishes in the sink so they looked like tidy stacks instead of falling stacks), and after several more freezer pack swaps (those things thaw quickly when against a fevered brow), and after finishing one of Agatha Christie's less well written murder mysteries that I've been working on for ages (it was nice reading something I hadn't proofread seven times), I poured more medicine down grateful gullets and went to bed.
Ker-splat.
Which is why I didn't know tornadoes went through my state last night.
Which is why I didn't hear the sirens.
Which is why the ground was wet this morning and people laughed when I said, "there were storms?"
Normally my self-preserving self likes to know all about weather forecasts, updates, situations, and doppler-related information.
I'm so glad I didn't know.
3 comments:
So the above comment was mine. There were too many typos for my liking. The Jell-O topic is a sensitive one for me and I was typing away too passionately to care about grammatical errors. Anyway, my comment--edited:
I can tell you why I don't make Jell-O more often. I rarely ever can get the little Jell-O crystals to dissolve like they're supposed to.
Pour the boiling water in. Stir, stir, stir, stir. Why aren't these miniature sand dunes disappearing? Stir, stir, stir, stir. Oops, wipe the sides of the pan from stirring too hard. Sand dunes still aren't going away. Stir, stir, stir, stir. Stick my finger in--apparently it's not hot enough. OUCH! Water is very hot! I'm sick of this, so I attempt to spread the little dunes evenly across the whole pan, pour the cold water in and stick the pan in the fridge. Gritty Jell-O--yum, yum.
Moment of truth: After I stick the pan in the fridge, I look at the box of Jell-O again, to see if I can find where I've gone wrong. Hmm. Best by Dec1406. Oh. Apparently, I don't make Jell-O often enough.
And that date? Yeah, it's real. It's sitting here in front of me. Orange flavored. Unmade as of now. Oh well, the boys don't know any better. They think that Jell-O is supposed to crunch when you chew it.
AAAAAHahahahahaha
Post a Comment