Day 0: Ride it on out like a bird in the sky ways...

So. It is 4:30 in the morning. I have been awake for three hours. Feh. Not good. Why am I awake? Well, a couple of hours after heading to bed, I woke up with my chest and arms itching like nobody's business.

Tuesday evening, resourceress and I had gone hot tubbing. I had not showered since, so I thought that perhaps I was reacting to the lingering chlorine on my body. It would be odd, since chlorine and I became close friends back in my lifeguard days, and I never reacted badly to it. But, still, things change. So I took a shower.

The thought also occurred to me that perhaps I was having some sort of allergic reaction. I am not allergic to much, just dust, pollen, and mold. However, my pillows and sheets are frequently tromped upon by half a dozen kitties whose paws can track litter dust onto the bed. If the sheets and pillowcases are not changed often enough, I have been known to wake up with strong allergic reactions. As I felt a tingling in my throat tonight, I wondered if the itching had anything to do w/ the allergies. So I took a dose of loratadine. Half an hour later, I took a second dose.

These solutions were only partially successful. The itching has died down, but not gone away. I tried to sleep an hour or so ago, but the attempt was unsuccessful. And I cannot sleep in tomorrow, as we have a meeting with our U-Chicago colleagues at 11am. Grrrrr.... At this point, my prime suspect for this reaction -- which I have never had before -- is the mefloquine, which I have been taking for the past month. It is an anti-malarial agent, and we were strongly advised to take something as prevention for malaria before traveling to India. This particular drug needs to be taken for one month after returning, too, as malaria is caused by a parasite that could be in my body right now. I just took the latest of my weekly doses on Tuesday night. The drug has a long list of side effects and I am awake that I have been experiencing some of them, such as vivid dreams and slight irritability. Not too much of a stretch to blame it for the itching, too, then. At least it's a theory. In all honesty, I'm much more interested in having the itching go away than in assigning blame for it.

To pass the time as I ride this out, I have been reading. Comic books, Live Journal, you name it. I have also been thinking. One of the things that I have been thinking about is this journal. As I have oft bemoaned, I don't seem to fill this journal the way that I would like to. When life is mellow, I don't have anything exciting to write. When life is interesting, it is usually too busy for me to find the time to write. And, atop it all, I get these ideas of writing old stories and then never do. In the past week, my Civic hit 100,000 miles -- a milestone that I photographed, since this is the first car I have put such mileage on -- and I went to Urbana to see cassiopia, and resourceress has been visiting, etc., etc. But I haven't written about it because I promised my next entries would be about SCUBA diving, Key West, the Cosmic Ray Conference, sightseeing in India, and Starwood. End result: No entries at all. More feh.

So, what to do? I'm going to snatch an idea for resourceress and steal her One Hundred Days of LJ idea. For the next hundred days, I will attempt to write one entry, no matter how trivial, each day. If something interesting is going on, I will write about that... or at least make footnotes as to what it is, if time is too tight. If nothing interesting is going on, I can muse about life, the universe, and everything. Or I can use the occasional slow day as a window to write about something cool from the past (e.g. Key West, India, Earthships). With any luck, my adoption of this experiment will make this journal a more interesting and lively place.

Now, then, let's see if I can sleep...........

Day 0: Ride it on out like a bird in the sky ways...

So. It is 4:30 in the morning. I have been awake for three hours. Feh. Not good. Why am I awake? Well, a couple of hours after heading to bed, I woke up with my chest and arms itching like nobody's business.

Tuesday evening, resourceress and I had gone hot tubbing. I had not showered since, so I thought that perhaps I was reacting to the lingering chlorine on my body. It would be odd, since chlorine and I became close friends back in my lifeguard days, and I never reacted badly to it. But, still, things change. So I took a shower.

The thought also occurred to me that perhaps I was having some sort of allergic reaction. I am not allergic to much, just dust, pollen, and mold. However, my pillows and sheets are frequently tromped upon by half a dozen kitties whose paws can track litter dust onto the bed. If the sheets and pillowcases are not changed often enough, I have been known to wake up with strong allergic reactions. As I felt a tingling in my throat tonight, I wondered if the itching had anything to do w/ the allergies. So I took a dose of loratadine. Half an hour later, I took a second dose.

These solutions were only partially successful. The itching has died down, but not gone away. I tried to sleep an hour or so ago, but the attempt was unsuccessful. And I cannot sleep in tomorrow, as we have a meeting with our U-Chicago colleagues at 11am. Grrrrr.... At this point, my prime suspect for this reaction -- which I have never had before -- is the mefloquine, which I have been taking for the past month. It is an anti-malarial agent, and we were strongly advised to take something as prevention for malaria before traveling to India. This particular drug needs to be taken for one month after returning, too, as malaria is caused by a parasite that could be in my body right now. I just took the latest of my weekly doses on Tuesday night. The drug has a long list of side effects and I am awake that I have been experiencing some of them, such as vivid dreams and slight irritability. Not too much of a stretch to blame it for the itching, too, then. At least it's a theory. In all honesty, I'm much more interested in having the itching go away than in assigning blame for it.

To pass the time as I ride this out, I have been reading. Comic books, Live Journal, you name it. I have also been thinking. One of the things that I have been thinking about is this journal. As I have oft bemoaned, I don't seem to fill this journal the way that I would like to. When life is mellow, I don't have anything exciting to write. When life is interesting, it is usually too busy for me to find the time to write. And, atop it all, I get these ideas of writing old stories and then never do. In the past week, my Civic hit 100,000 miles -- a milestone that I photographed, since this is the first car I have put such mileage on -- and I went to Urbana to see cassiopia, and resourceress has been visiting, etc., etc. But I haven't written about it because I promised my next entries would be about SCUBA diving, Key West, the Cosmic Ray Conference, sightseeing in India, and Starwood. End result: No entries at all. More feh.

So, what to do? I'm going to snatch an idea for resourceress and steal her One Hundred Days of LJ idea. For the next hundred days, I will attempt to write one entry, no matter how trivial, each day. If something interesting is going on, I will write about that... or at least make footnotes as to what it is, if time is too tight. If nothing interesting is going on, I can muse about life, the universe, and everything. Or I can use the occasional slow day as a window to write about something cool from the past (e.g. Key West, India, Earthships). With any luck, my adoption of this experiment will make this journal a more interesting and lively place.

Now, then, let's see if I can sleep...........