Mom & Me Four Archive

...is covered over at The Dailies; the highlights and categories, anyway. For a day or so I worked hard on finishing the TOC compiling. I've still got a little left to do. There have been errands, and Mom's been up a lot despite her very late awakening times. Her retiring times have been equally late. Her energy level's been good, although she is still refusing to go out. She continues to love receiving the morning paper. Funny, though, she doesn't pay that much attention to the Sunday paper. I finally asked her, this last Sunday, why she's ignoring it.
    "It's too big," she said.
    This clued me that if I shave it down, take out the classifieds, sports section and most of the ads (there are some that she likes) before she awakens, she might be more prone to read it.
    The main reason I haven't been here, though, is that I am, once again, having a minor health problem that is affecting the way I feel over all. I am prone to boils. I inherited this delightful little tendency from my father. I'm pretty good at preventing them. For decades I've dosed myself generously with a variety of antibiotic spices and supplements (garlic; all kinds of peppers including ground spice and chopped fresh peppers; all kinds of onions; potent one or combo spices like saffron, curry mixtures, etc., detoxifying teas) and, of course, I see to it that I drink lots of water. My grooming habits also take this tendency into account. All these usually work. It's been several years since I've had a boil. Can't even remember the last one. Toward the end of last week, though, I noticed a suspicious, angry lump developing in a very odd place (I usually develop internally caused boils at pressure points, like my ass, for instance, or the inner side of joints like underarms, the backs of knees): The outside of my upper right calf, centimeters from the same place I developed my Guam Sore when I was 9. For those of you who aren't familiar with Guam Sores, they occur when you are bitten by a mosquito, you scratch it open, coral dust settles into the wound, begins to grow and develops into a boil-like sore that takes several days, soaking and antibiotics, both topical and internal, to heal. From that point on you typically are no longer tasty to the mosquitoes on Guam.
    Anyway, I've been treating this boil carefully and thoroughly but it's taking a long time to drain and heal. I've also been considering it a localized infection. Today, though, as I was soaking the boil, cleaning it and applying more drawing salve (it's just about clear; the core has been expelled and the area of infection and pain has significantly reduced since yesterday) I realized that it's probably the reason I've been feeling so low physically, lately, which also tends to cause me to feel temperamentally removed. I've been easily tired for several days, haven't felt much like eating, have taken naps every other day, which is really unusually for me, and have not been prone to initiate any excitement around here for any reason. The two times I headed out to do yard work I way overestimated the sturdiness of my available energy and left my projects before they were finished.
    The crux of my realization that the boil was having an effect on my overall health and well being was when my mother mentioned, tonight, in passing, "You seem to be feeling much better, tonight, than you have for several days."
    Yeah. I do. And, frankly, I didn't realize it until her comment.
    The truth is, this episode worries me a bit. The last nine months or so have found me sloshing around in a swamp of colds, unusual physical irritations and then, well, then last week I develop a boil. This tells me that I am seriously run down, more than I previously thought. I'm not sure what I can do about this but I'm thinking about it.
    So, anyway, I expect I'll be picking up my usual reporting schedule here as my body ramps itself back up.
    Later.