Holding Pattern

Ah! My sesquibiannual ailment has returned! (That’s an ailment that recurs every nine months or so.) Bronchitis. A virus doctors treat with antibiotics. When I get the z-pack in me, I’m better 48 hours later, though the virus dwells within my bronchial tracts for up to 21 days.

Last Friday the wife and little ladies drove down to DC to visit her sister’s family. I stayed to do tax returns, and I did six or seven of them that day and Saturday. Then, home not a half hour Saturday Eve, I felt a bit dizzy, a bit hot-flashy, and more than a bit tired. It descended on me so fast that by 10 pm I was in complete oblivion, shaking, just about passed out on the couch. How the dog got walked and fed I do not remember.

I called out sick from the day job three days in a row and from the night-time tax return job once. How I did a tax return that Tuesday again I know not. Wednesday we got the fourth nor’easter of the month, and in my shaky weakness managed to shovel us out three times so I wouldn’t throw my back out shoveling us out once.

Sometime Thursday night my strength returned. In fact, I did seven tax returns yesterday and today, and closed them all out. That’s nice.

I made very slow headway in my baseball book over these past couple of days. I even cracked a long anticipated Napoleon bio but only made it 20 or so pages in. Most of the time I spent surfing the web on my cell phone in a hot bath tub, wracked with wheezing coughing fits.

Have to work tomorrow morning, 9-12. It’s the beginning of the final push in the tax season, “peak number two,” (the first peak is the two weeks after W-2s are released). I’m going to be working 32 extra additional hours between now and April 17. Hoping to make some good coin too. So far, to date, I’ve done 73 returns (last year I did 44 total). The more I do, the more I get paid. I’m hoping to do 100-120 this year, but the lead at my office thinks I can do 200. We’ll see.

Tomorrow afternoon is Patch’s first soccer game of the season. That’ll be interesting. My father-in-law is driving up from the Jersey shore to watch it with us, and, per tradition, we’ll probably hit IHOP for an early dinner afterward.

Hopefully more entertaining stuff down the pike as I get healthier. More weirdities, as I always enjoying musing about here on these pages, and haven’t done so in a long while.

Oh, and here are two little pics I texted Little One during the week, which she hearted: