One or more of the random cold viruses going around have struck Hillbilly Hill. I stayed home today to nurse a head cold, starting off with a trip to the grocery store to get chicken soup ingredients. I managed to avoid the fresh-baked donuts (ah, the grocery store bakery smell at 8 a.m.!), which is further evidence that I’m off kilter today.

Picked up ingredients for homemade soup, Zicam zinc tablets, Airborne, juice, two boxes of Puffs Plus with the lotion in it (genius!), InTouch magazine and a thing of Clorox disinfectant wipes. I appreciated the automatic checkout machine not saying in that nice-lady voice, “Thank you for shopping at Gerbes. You are a total cliche.”

Chip has the same cold – congestion, slight sore throat, tiredness, blah blah blah. You get the picture. I think all the swine flu propaganda has made any symptom list sound completely generic and identical to all other symptom lists. Am I making any sense?

Joshua had it a few weeks ago, although his was more of a cough. Ian and Calen have had it to varying degrees too, mostly the low-grade cough thing.

Kaya has ringworm on her leg. I guess that’s not exactly a cold virus, at all, but she’s otherwise healthy and I thought she should get a mention too. Ringworm is weird, and guess what, it’s not a worm! Who comes up with these things?

And since we’re reporting out on everybody, I’ll add that Hazel has an eye infection (I’ll spare you the details, thank me later) and Zoe has dreadlocks forming in her fur. This happens once in a while and we have to cut them out. Bagel is just Bagel. Lions and tigers doing A-OK.

I’m going back to work tomorrow and actually don’t feel the deep sense of dread I’ve been facing most work days. Why, you ask? Because we hired someone for the St. Louis job I’ve been covering! Someone totally awesome! (You know who you are! [She reads this sometimes, I think ...]) Which means I get to go back to only doing one demanding management job. The reality of this has finally started to sink in, and I can’t begin to explain how amazing it feels. It’s been a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong 18 months of covering both.

I think the unwinding/destressing process is going to take a while. A cozy winter at Hillbilly Hill, complete with our new (safer and more efficient) wood-burning stove, plus Thanksgiving in St. Louis with the fam, should help a lot.