I’ve been sick. You can tell just exactly how much I don’t feel good by the fact that I haven’t complained about it much. I don’t have the energy.

This past week was especially rough as breathing has been a task. Since when should trying to suck oxygen into your being be hard work?

We had made plans to go to Cedar Point for their very spooky and fun filled event known as Halloweekend and I was having major reservations. I didn’t feel well, what if I went and it rained? What if I got sicker? What if I died midway through a roller coaster and they had to pry my cold dead hands off the side of the cart?

Some of my concerns where crazy of course, but then there arised some that I didn’t even give a thought to.

We arrived in Sandusky around 2am and settled into our rooms. At around 3 we went to bed and this is when concern number one hit me. My pillow. It was flat. It was flatter than a fart squeezed out by an elephant who was sitting on a concrete slab. I bunched it, I turned it, I scrunched it, I flipped it.. nothing made it more than it was. I even tried sighing dramatically at it with vexed exasperation. But that didn’t matter because Jason (who was sick as well) snored until 6:30am. I know it was 6:30 because I had spent the three and a half hours since laying down listening to him sleep loudly. Then for some unknown (to me ) reason, he stopped at 6:30. “At Last!” I screamed inside my own head and got down to the business of sleeping myself. Except sleep never came so at 8, when the kids in the hotel ingested the compliementary bucket of sugar that the hotel provided and began to run amuk in the halls, I was leaning on my elbow trying to breathe.

The next surprise for me was when I drug my sleep deprived unbreathing carcus into the shower. All I needed, I thought, was a nice hot shower to loosen up the congestion in my head and get me ready for the day. Imagine my shock and dismay when I turned the water in the shower on and the hot water was just as cold as the cold water. Possibly colder. I had apparently missed the “shower window” in the hotel.

I grumbled my way through getting dressed and we ventured out under a gray and cloudy sky to find breakfast before we went into the park. Once we had some food (by this time, lunch, as McDonald’s was the only place open in the area and was also serving lunch by this point in time) I began to systematically suck down a variety of medication in the hope that something would allow me to suck some small amount of air through the holes that I used to rely on so heavily.

We arrived at the park and it certainly did not disappoint. We spent the morning and afternoon there until around 4:30 when the winds had finally chilled us to the bone and the rain had dampened our spirits enough to venture back out to find something for dinner in a warm and dry location.

After dinner (and a win by Penn State!) we made our way back to the park. It was getting dark now. Things were certainly going to begin to get interesting. We finished out or tour de force of hitting as many coasters as humanly possible and left the park as it closed around midnight; unable to walk a single step farther than the car.

That evening I had somehow found the correct ingredient to ingest that I was able to get a few, precious (6) hours of sleep before waking up the next morning and preparing to depart. My head pounded and throbbed with wreckless abandon for the remainder of the day. And I had to do housework and homework on top of that when I arrived home.

For the past two days I have been going to bed at roughly 8pm in an attempt to recapture the sleep that I so desperately needed. Given the chance to do it all over again I would certainly do it, however I would change two things:

1) Bring my own pillow

2) Not be sick

Monday morning I woke up feeling disgusting. At 3am. First I was too cold. Then I was too hot. Then I was too cold again. It was a fun filled few hours until the alarm went off and I announced to Jason and the cats that there was no way in hell I was going to work. I felt like death warmed over twice. The kind with the burnt cheese around the edges.

Later in the morning I scraped myself out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen for some food of some sort and to whine to the cats about how awful I felt. They listened with rapt attention (while I was in the kitchen) but quickly turned their minds to other things. Like sleeping.

I had bought ingredients the previous day for a crock pot recipe I’d seen on All Recipes.com for Chicken and Dumplings that I wanted to make sometime this week and I figured that Monday was as good a day as any. I longed for the warm chickeny goodness that was hopefully going to fill a bowl around dinner time with my name on it.

Being true to self, I not only didn’t follow the recipe exactly, I also didn’t take any photos of the end product, which you’ll just have to take my word for, was awesome.

Here is what I did. I bought a can of cream of chicken and a can of cream of broccoli condensed soups. I also bought a box of chicken stock, three chicken breasts, poultry seasoning, an onion and pack of store brand giant fridge buttermilk biscuits; the ones that are supposed to flake apart.

Dump the soup into the crockpot (I line mine with those crock pot bags because I am lazy), mix it up a bit, plop the chicken in and I rolled mine around to coat them.. which was probably not necessary but I did it anyway. Because I could. Then dump your onion in. I then dumped in some cumin, poultry seasoning, black pepper and about three cloves of garlic. I didn’t really measure how much seasoning I put into it.. I just dumped some in the palm of my hand until it was about the size of a shooter marble and sprinkled it all over the place. Then I covered it all with chicken broth and turned the heat on for 6 hours.

When it got to be on for about 5 hours, I got the biscuits out of the fridge, cut them into quarters and opened the crock pot (which is apparently a no no.. but I did it anyway. I’m a rebel in this way) put them evenly on top of the bubbling broth/soup mixture and pushed them down gently. Replace the lid and let it go for about an hour. My crockpot switches to warm after this and I let it go for another half an hour and everything was still bubbling like crazy. That’s it. It’s ready to eat.

If I make this again I think I’ll break the chicken up before I put the biscuits on top.. I think it’d be better that way, but this is what experimentation is for.

While I was laying on the couch, again complaining to the cats (both of whom were past caring but this point) the doorbell rang and a small box was sitting just inside the storm door.

It was a gift from my dear friend Emilie and a card just to say hello. How she knew exactly when I needed a pick me up most, I’ll never know but her timing is impecable. My little phoenix and I have been spending quality time together ever since.

Somewhere, someone did something very bad and then they moved to State College last week.

It started Thursday night. That was when the sky began to fall. Or you could say that it began to snow, heavily or that there was heavy snow falling, but lets be frank here a moment. This was not the snow out of a Norman Rockwell painting. This snow was from hell. I know this to be true because people are always going around saying things like “It’ll be a cold day in hell when….”. It stands to reason then that this heavy tree breaking, power destroying snow came from the darkest depths itself.

You see, around 3:13 AM I woke up. Or I was woken up. All I know is I was warm and then I was awake and alert rather quickly. All around outside there were these popping sounds. I fumbled with the alarm clock to see what time it was and noticed that the overly bright digits were vacant and the room was a lucious sleep enducing ink blackness. I got up to see what was going on and Jason informed me of two things. 1) The world as we knew it was ending The power had gone out and 2) Trees were breaking from the weight of the snow.

Now this isn’t really earth shattering news, except when put into context of the development. We live in a place that is two blocks from the main highway and yet feels like it’s a tranquil wooded hamlet that crawls many twisty windy roads. In fact, the first three times that our realtor he took us into the development a different way each time, I said I liked it but I had no idea where it was at. So there are trees. Massive trees. With branches. Branches that were now being pushed down by… snow. Heavy, wet, snow from hell snow.

So we got up that morning and showered by flashlight (everyone should try living via LED) in what was probably a record time for me to conserve what hot water was left in the water heater and then we went to work where it was much discussed and talked about and the general concensus was that power would be restored around 6pm the following day. That’s Saturday.

One night of roughing it didn’t seem too bad. We went out for dinner (Can’t cook! darn!) and I got a bottle of rum to help me stay warm and we had a fabulous evening of playing boardgames by candle light. Also blankets.

After an adventurous evening we went to bed with the vision of lights and warm water in our near future. The following day we went to our friend’s Dennis and Mike’s house where they graciously let us mooch their electricity and warm water for a couple of hours. By the time we arrived home, we thought, we’d have electricity of our own. Oh how wrong we were.

We got home and there was no power. When we called the power company for their automated message the time had remained the same (6pm) but the date was now Sunday. We’d be spending another 24 hours without heat or electricity. It would have been fine had it been warm outside, but it was in the mid 30’s and I am nothing if not a wuss about cold weather. The house got down to about 50 when all was said and done, so it was much warmer than it was outside, yet we could still see our breath. Which was not fun. Except for like a second, when it was really cool.

Faced with yet another evening of empty nothingness we sat on the couch with as many blankets as we could gather and wrap around ourselves and inserts a cat or two for good measure. It is a little known fact that cats are very good portable space heaters. Plus, if they’re happy… instant massager.

Going to bed Saturday night was rather depressing. When we woke up in the morning, two things happened for me. I first heard the furnace kick on around 9:45 (which was quite exciting) and then I realized that I could barely breathe out of one nostril. I had gotten sick, either on my own or I caught a little bit of what Jason was trying to infect the world with.

I can not tell you how much self control I had to muster not to spring out of bed, crank the heat to 95 and turn every light in the house on. Just because I could. The siege, as far as Mother Nature was concerned, was over.

Life Sunday was all about getting things back together again. We had to defunk the fridge (as all our food was sitting there with no cooling action happening), do laundry, do dishes.. all of the normal fun home things.

Sunday night as I lay in bed shifting from alternating bouts of freezing to sweating mess I decided right then and there that I had had enough! I was done with this roller coaster of degrees and lack there of! I spent the better part of Monday in bed. After getting up Monday and trying to remove the boulder that felt like it was in the back of my throat.

I shelpt myself around the house and even though I felt awful I thought about doing some chores and then decided against it in favor of no activity at all. Although, I did manage to cook myself dinner. The day brightened significantly in the afternoon, but I’ll touch on those topics tomorrow.

It’s usually around this time of the year that I get depressed. Not like deep, deep depressed more of a ‘I’m in a rut’ type feeling. It’s this time of year when the weather gets colder, the leaves start to change and then drop and you know.. it’s a perfect time for it to be 30 degrees and snowy outside. Perfect by nature’s standards, not my own.

It’s hard to move from the fun-filled, carefree summer full of shorts and gatherings and lazy hours spent sitting in the sun to puffy coats, homework, and bleak gray days where the wind cuts you like a knife. It’s hard to accept. It’s hard to function. It’s hard to want to function.

But I do. I want to somehow bottle up that summertime glow so that on the most bleakest of bleak days where the windchill will be in the negatives and even with a big puffy coat you feel disgustingly underdressed, I can open it and take a sip and just feel…. content. Or even energized.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Or attempt to do. Because the holidays (for better or worse) are quickly approaching and I want things to be perfect. I have no idea where I ever got the notion that anything is ever perfect, but if there were a perfect time, this upcoming season would be it. It’s magical and special and I want it to be blissful and to cherish it always.

I’m not exactly sure what that entails yet. It’s kind of like my dashing adventure where I wasn’t even sure if once I was done with it that it would work out or look the way I wanted it to. It’s more about the journey than the end result. My hopes are that I’ll arrive at my destination and before I really have a chance for it to sink it, summer will be back and I’ll be able to refill my bottle and long wistfully for the weather to cool off again, for the leaves to begin changing colors and for the warm scent of baking spices to once again fill the air.