1. Visited my parents in West Virginia.

2. Saw lots of beautiful fall-colored leaves.

3. Got a stomach bug.

4. Spent a lot of time on my parents’ couch.

5. Spent a lot of time in my parents’ bathroom.

And so on. Now, we’re back home, and it’s back to school, back to work…and hopefully back to normal.

More soon. (Including pictures of the leaves.)

In the meantime, I’m working on my syllabi for this upcoming semester, putting readings on the schedules, deciding on office hours, trying to arrange things just so. Fall, I’ve decided, is my favorite semester. All the stores are advertising their back-to-school sales, and there’s something lovely about aisles of orange pencils and notebooks and Elmer’s glue. We all get a fresh start, a clean slate, and the world is full of possibility.

The Great Purge of 2011 is coming along nicely, though the result is that our bedroom is now overflowing with all the stuff that needs to find its way out of our house, one way or another. I’m hoping a Goodwill run is in our near future.

The weekend holds great promise: Goodwill perhaps, and time with a friend who is coming to town from Atlanta, and maybe–just maybe–I’ll get back to that thing I was writing in California.

Now, if I can just kick this cold…

But sometimes I get stir crazy, even though I lack the energy for much stirring. The other day, I spent probably a solid hour watching online tutorials about how to tie scarves. Then, I got out every scarf I own, and practiced.

Oliver watched me with amusement and mild horror.

Well, I have to do something other than constantly sleep, read, and feel guilty at what a mess my house is.

Plus, did you know that right now–as I type–it’s 57 degrees in San Francisco? And my adopted July neighborhood is reportedly in one of the foggiest parts of the city. So, scarves.

Also, we got a new little snapshot camera. Here’s a picture of Oliver, pretending he’s not about to get on the counter top and hunt for food.

You may notice several of the cookbooks have bite marks on their corners. Sometimes, Oliver feels frustrated in the kitchen.

But I can’t bring myself to write it yet. Since then, we’ve felt awful, and I need to first make sure we’re not dying of Excess Exposure to Bleach While Sick with Mono. Once we’re in the clear, the garage story will be funny. And then I will tell it to you.

In the meantime, watch this time-lapse video of fog and San Francisco by Simon Christen: The Unseen Sea. It’s amazing. (Then, go to his website and watch his other time-lapse videos. They’re pretty amazing too.)

We had good reasons for not going to the doctor:

1. It could be allergies.

2. Or the fact that I’d gone off coffee and Jesse stopped drinking soda.

3. Or maybe we were just lazy people. That seemed most likely.

4. Plus, we needed to be on death’s door to justify the expense of a trip to the doctor.

This is the major flaw we’re discovering in our “catastrophic coverage/HSA” insurance. The supposed benefit to the HSA is that we’d be “consumers of healthcare” and this would inspire us to make better choices with our healthcare, as now we’d be aware of the costs involved. Well, the only thing it’s done is make us stop going to the doctor. Which means we’ve been carrying around a virus for the last two and a half weeks, possibly infecting others without even knowing it. Imagine if it were something worse than mono.

Anyway, the other night my throat felt worse and I checked it in the mirror with a flashlight. Then I saw it. A giant bulge in the back of my throat.

I immediately thought: Throat cancer! Oh no! And I didn’t even smoke!

(Tell me you do this too. Assume the worst? Anyone? Please?)

Then I remembered that Jesse and I were having the same symptoms and figured that identical throat cancers wasn’t too probable. I decided to go to the doctor. Okay, so I wasn’t on death’s door, but I had a growth. To me, that qualifies. So maybe it wasn’t cancer, but it had to be something serious because there was a growth. I felt a little depressed and sorry for myself, in case I were dying before I even got to have my month in San Francisco. That night, Jesse took me out for Gelato to make me feel better, and it helped.

So yesterday, the doctor checked me over, gave me a strep test (negative), and pronounced it allergies. I was unconvinced. I asked about mono. (I’d spent a good amount of time the day before looking at all the online medical stuff about sore throats, and felt mono the most likely culprit. Anybody do that too? I bet doctors get annoyed at all the self-diagnosing, but I don’t really care.) He said it was highly unlikely, as most adults were immune by now. But Jesse and I were both homeschooled, so it made sense to me that maybe we’d not had as much exposure as the normal adult. He agreed to test me anyway, and gave me a prescription for some allergy medicine.

Because you’ve already read the subject line, you know the test came back positive.

Sigh. My luck this year. I swear. I just hope it’s gone before July…

I’m going back to bed now.

See, Azalea Fest can be expensive. Between parking and the huge variety of over-priced unhealthy “food” options, there’s no need to actually purchase something of value in order to spend money. But Jesse and I were living large, so we decided to eat lunch at AF and snag some ice cream afterward.

I wanted a hot dog. I figured that would be a fairly inexpensive option, considering the overpriced seafood platters and the $7 bacon burger sandwiched between two doughnuts.

But all the hot dogs we found were $3. Three dollars! For a hot dog!

I fancy myself a person who does not pay $3 for a hot dog, no matter the circumstances, so I embarked on a search to find a cheaper dog. Jesse and I walked up and down the main food street, asking everyone their hot dog prices.

And finally, I found it. A $2.50 hot dog. Success! (Yes, it’s just fifty cents. But still. It’s the principle that counts.)

We ate our $2.50 hot dogs under a parking deck (shade) and felt like we were living life on the edge. Taking risks. Eating hot dogs at the street fair. Getting sunburned in April and not caring. And now, time for dessert.

We paid far too much for ice cream, though, and it didn’t even taste good. Can you imagine? How can ice cream not taste good? Is it possible to water-down ice cream? I ate every bite of it, though, because I had paid a whopping $4 on a dipped cone, and by George I was eating the whole thing, like it or not.

Well, at least we’d found the cheapest hot dogs there.

Ha.

It didn’t hit me for a while. We went to church and went to dinner with friends and came home and went to bed.

And then, my pulse started racing. I felt hot. My stomach started complaining. And so began the night of regular bathroom trips. Up and down I went, all night, acutely aware of how early I had to get up the next morning. I watched the clock hit 1:00, 1:30, 2:00, 2:30. And on. After enough trips though, and after the “cheap” hot dog had long come up, I knew I would have to call in sick for at least my first class.

I got a few hours of fitful sleep, woke up, and managed to hold down a couple spoonfuls of Rice Krispies and some water. Weak as a kitten, I managed to drive to work, teach three classes, and hold two and a half hours of office hours. I graded papers and journal entries. I hesitantly ate a small peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I drank more water. I cursed the $2.50 hot dog. Repeatedly.

Then I came home and sorted laundry, but before I could put a load in the washer, I collapsed in bed and promptly passed out.

Moral of the story: Saving money is good, but don’t go for the cheap hot dogs.

At one point, I fell asleep on the futon. Oliver was cuddling with me, enjoying the music. Then, Gracie decided the party shouldn’t happen without her and woke us both up. Silly Gracie! I needed that sleep.

Now I’m awake, but groggy and slow. I got some work done. I answered some emails. I printed a few things. I made some decisions. Then, I felt a sense of dread as I realized I was feeling a little warm. This close to the end of the semester, when I’m almost there? Really?

If I’m getting sick, as the scratchy throat and swollen lymph nodes seem to suggest, I’m going to pitch a big fit.

But for now, I’ll settle for some hot tea.

Aaand, our washing machine is leaking.

Aaand, I have a sore throat.

It just keeps coming.

Jesse has been laid out flat by some bug he came down with right after New Year’s. And our health insurance is different this year, so he’s resisting a doctor’s visit because of the cost. So, he will suffer along here for a few more days and cave next week if there’s no improvement. He wakes up coughing and can’t stop around 4:00 every morning when the NyQuil wears off. I wake up with him. I get him a glass of water. I bring him a tablespoon of honey. I beg him to agree go to the doctor the next day. I settle for his taking another dose of medicine.

I’m very tired.

Today I’ve got big plans to clean the house, really clean it. The litter boxes need to be taken outside and scoured. The floors need mopping. The carpets need steam cleaning. Everything needs to be disinfected. The linens need to be changed. Perhaps the sparkling-clean environment will help Jesse recover more quickly. But at least I will be starting the semester with a clean house, a clean slate–and isn’t that the beauty of college, that every four months you get another crack at it, you get to start over?

The last funeral I was at, though, was on a bright sunny dusty Congo day. It was May, usually a good month, but perhaps the bad months are different in Africa. The day was hot, and it was the dry season, which means no afternoon rains to tamp down the dust, the orange dust that rises from the roads in clouds, kicked up by cars and people and animals. It settles on everything, this dust, a film of orange-brown, and you can draw your finger along a wide green leaf and watch the stripe form in your wake.

We knew Fiston’s aunt was sick. We’d dropped him off at the hospital one day after the conference. We didn’t know what it was. I’m not sure he knew how to translate the diagnosis. We didn’t know how serious. And then one Sunday evening we were in Mudaka, a little village outside of town, past fields of banana trees, past green mountains, past army trucks and soldiers. We were in a one-room hut, a church, with dirt floors and mud walls. Jessica and I preached, and as we left the church the sun was setting, the air was pale and thin and everyone got quiet as the news passed, whispered from one of us to another: Fiston’s aunt has died.

The drive to Bukavu was in silence. We watched the road, watched the dark hills, watched the black lake. Everything was dark, except Fiston’s bright yellow shirt, in the middle of the van, like a lamp.

The funeral was the next day. Family came in from all over, hundreds of people stuffed into a house with white walls and tall ceilings, relatives, relatives, relatives, and you don’t know how anyone sleeps, and maybe they don’t.

We drove up and parked on the street, the dust lifting to meet us, flying into our faces. We walked to the house, the air buzzing with warmth and the out of the ordinary. And we greeted the family, walked through a path that took us through the house and into the backyard, where we saw a box.

It takes your breath away, a bit, to see the box, just a wooden box about the size of a woman, and there’s a window on the top of the box, just over the face, and there’s a framed picture of the woman on top of the box. There was the vague anxiety of not knowing the cause of death. There was, in the back of my mind, the articles read about Ebola in Congo, the outbreak a couple years ago. I felt a little sick. People crowded into the backyard. They were sitting in rows several people deep. I had been to the house before, when it was empty except for one family, and I remember sitting on the sofa drinking Coke from a tall slender bottle, and when it started to rain Fiston and I ran outside to collect the laundry that had been drying on the bushes.

Now the backyard looked quite different. The rains were gone. The dust was on everything.

We hugged Fiston, told him we loved him, kept moving through the path, walking forward, moving back to the street. We got back in the van. The dust clouded the windows. Or that’s how I remember it—fuzzy, cloudy, blurry.

The streets were so clogged, we couldn’t leave right away. We sat in the van and waited. There was always a little bit of anxiety when we were stuck in the van and couldn’t move. A feeling of being trapped. And the dust and the heat and the people outside pouring around us and then a crowd emerged from the direction of the house. A big truck stopped in the street and people came out carrying the coffin, the window on top now closed, and women screamed, and everyone who wasn’t screaming stopped to look, or they jumped onto the truck with the coffin, you’ve never seen a truck carry so many people, and then it took off up the road, up the hill, toward the graveyard.

It happened fast. It happened in slow motion. I can still hear their screams, and feel the dust in the back of my throat.

Sometimes it’s January, and sometimes it’s May. The pessimist in me wonders what funerals 2011 will bring. The denial part doesn’t want to think about it. The realist hasn’t made up her mind what to think. The realist never knows how to end things, never knows how to wrap it up—sometimes it’s January, and sometimes it’s May. Sometimes it’s your family, and sometimes it’s someone else’s. And time continues.