Wyatt and I made a gingerbread house the other night. I wanted it to be fun, so instead of going through all of the hassle of making gingerbread dough, rolling it out, baking it and then accidentally breaking it into 3 or 4 pieces, I decided to buy a kit with pre-baked pieces. It came with candy and frosting too so we were all set. It took me a little while to get the consistency of the frosting right, but once I got it right it was a great glue. Wyatt liked putting pieces on the roof, but mostly he just wanted to eat the candy.

In my opinion, gingerbread houses look best when they have a lot of candy on them. Can you tell by looking at the photos? Here is a front view:

Side view:

Back view — Wyatt and I are sharing the “W”.

Now we know why I’ve been feeling so crappy for the last couple of months:

This also explains why the antibiotics haven’t been working — because mono is a virus.

I just finished a great book, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. This was a good book to read while I was sick — part memoir, part cookbook, part instruction manual for life on a farm. The chapters are short but packed with interesting anecdotes and reading the book feels a lot like sitting and talking with a vivacious great aunt at a family reunion.

I’m not a farm girl, but I am an Iowan at my core and this book is a love letter to Iowa. Kalish’s descriptions of the fall of a summer evening and the feel of the air just before a thunderstorm made me ache for my home state. The Bay Area is lovely, but after seventeen years here, the weather still feels wrong to me. Nothing makes me homesick like the memory of dusk in July with that damp blanket of warm air and all the neighbor kids running around the yard playing tag. We may have been born 50 years apart, but I know where this woman is coming from.

Kalish is just a little younger than my Grandma Ruby was and that added another level enjoyment to this book for me. It helped me picture what my Grandma’s life was like when she was a girl and reminded me of some of the stories she told me. And I miss my Grandma, so that was a nice feeling.

This is a little album I made with my new Bind-It-All. It’s about 4.5″ x 2.75″. The cover is made of chipboard that I painted green.

For the inner pages, I used coin sized envelopes. I cut the flaps off and then punched a half circle out of the open end.

I then put a piece of cardstock in each envelope with a photo adhered to it. Little pieces of ribbon were stapled on for pulls.

All the patterned paper and die cuts are Basic Grey Mellow.

Just thought I’d give an update about my current state of health.  I went to the doctor again the day I wrote my last post and indeed, I still have strep.  And he described it as “a drug-resistant strain of strep” — just as I feared! So I’m on another course of antibiotics and I’m sick as a dog — the sickest I’ve been since this whole thing started. Fevers, chills, and my tonsils look absolutely amazing.  You can barely even see the red of my tonsils for all the white spots on them. I don’t remember them looking so disgusting since I was a little kid.

I think the antibiotics are beginning to work though because I feel a smidgen better today. I’m taking clarithromycin which I’ve never taken before. So far the only noticeable problem it’s causing me is that it’s giving me this really nasty taste in my mouth. I can handle that, especially when you compare it to some of the side effects of other antibiotics I’ve taken in the past, but I’m not enjoying it very much.

All right then, back to laying around on the couch reading mystery novels.

I haven’t been blogging lately because I haven’t had much to write about. I’ve basically been sick, or working for the last two months and I don’t really think anyone cares to read a big (or little) post about that. In short, I haven’t wanted to be a big whiner so I’ve been avoiding blogging.

But there’s nothing sadder than an abandoned blog, so I’m going to force myself to write a post. It’s probably going to be a little whiny from this point on though, so if you’d like to move along, Internet, I’ll understand.

Remember how I was sick back on my birthday? Well, I never fully recovered and I’ve been feeling anywhere between very sick and merely tired ever since then. A couple of weeks ago, it all bubbled to the surface again and I got really sick — fever, white spots on my tonsils, and very, very tired. I had to take three days off work and I made a trip to Kaiser, where the much better doctor took one look in my mouth and told me I had a secondary bacterial infection because I’d never fully kicked my illness back in September. He gave me a script for antibiotics and sent me on my way. They helped me feel significantly better, but my sore throat never went completely away. Now, about two weeks later, I have a raging sore throat and the white spots are coming back. I can’t even believe this is happening to me again! Seriously, I can’t believe it. I’m beginning to wonder if I have some kind of disease that doesn’t respond to antibiotics.

To top things off, I’m extremely busy at work. Probably what I need to do is take a week off work to just to sleep and rest so that I can kick this thing once and for all, but we have contractors coming in to work on our new site, we’re working with a design firm on new information architecture, and there are about 35 other projects in the pipeline so I just have to be there.

I promise, I’m going to start doing something interesting again soon.

Whining complete.