The old cold

 I have the cold that has been going around for so long.  I haven’t had any illness since the persistent cough that wracked me most of May in Korea.  I tried to ignore it this morning; I did 2 loads of laundry while listening to Korean cds, walked downtown to the bank, came home, ate some soup and lay down for over an hour.  Now I’m sitting in front of this laptop staring at the cursor, finally admitting defeat.

I’ve been making an effort to get back to Korean lately.  If I compare this to the building of the railway across Canada, I’m at the stage of laying down track.  Sometimes the effort of remembering such strange words makes my brain hurt almost as much as if real spikes were being driven into it, and I’m still a long way from Craigellachie, let alone from buying rolling stock.  When I’m sitting in the living room listening to my cds, I can repeat Pimsleur’s phrases as if I were a lifetime resident of Seoul, but when I try to make an appropriate comment in Korean to Lucia or one of my students, I can’t.  It really is testing my determination to learn ‘anything but bridge’ in my old age to keep my mind alive.

Tonight I’m going to listen to a presentation on autism with the gang from SSASS.  We’re having a potluck before.  I was too lazy to cook anything, so, I picked up a pizza at a really good Italian deli nearby as I was wandering aimlessly around town in the warm sun on my way home from the bank.  We seem to be heading into an early spring; that’s what the groundhogs predicted, isn’t it?  Most of the snow has melted in the yard, but there’s still a lot in the hills.  I was cross-country skiing on Monday and Thursday and tomorrow I will have 2 classes with SSASS.  I was talking with Jay about the fact that since I dislocated my shoulder last February, I have not really enjoyed down hill skiing.  I’m too frightened.  We agreed that I should probably quit, so I think I’ll enjoy some easy stuff this season and next year I’ll just do cross-country.  Our decision was reinforced this morning.  As I was carrying my pizza home across a parking lot, I saw and stopped to talk with a friend from the VOC.  She had just come out of the doctor’s office after seeing him about an aching knee.  She had spent 3 consecutive days downhill skiing before one of her knees became very stiff and sore; the doctor said that the scan showed it to be pretty worn-out.  At our age we have to moderate ‘use it or lose it’, and that’s not all bad, since we are our age.

Now it’s Sunday.  I didn’t work with SSASS yesterday.  I was coughing so much at the meeting Friday night that one of my colleagues moved away from me and everyone suggested that I stay home and rest on Saturday, which I did.  My head aches, my nose runs, I have a heavy cough that practically gags me at times, etc., etc.  Tomorrow is Family Day in BC, and I think I’ll spend it at home too.  By then the worst should be over.  The main thought I have is that I hope my dad doesn’t get this.  He couldn’t cough his way out of it; he’s so frail.  When I talked with mom and dad on Friday, I discovered that he had fallen earlier in the week and mom had found him bleeding from the ear.  They were unable to get him up, so she called the ambulance, for the third time in 8 months.  Luckily, they discovered at the hospital that the blood was from a deep cut by his ear and not coming from inside.  Within a few hours, they were back at home, but he sounded very weak on the phone and mom sounded weary.  They are at the limit of their abilities to keep themselves going independently. 

The 'real deal' Aussie flat white.  It was made by the only barista at Silver Star who actually worked at The Dome, a coffee shop Mo remembers from her time in Australia.  Mo took the picture.