The weekend... could have been worse.

The rallying cry of the unhappy optimist. "It could have been worse." It can always have been worse. Truthfully, nothing absolutely horrible happened, and I even managed to have some fun. But next weekend had damned well better be better.

So this is going to be a slightly whiney Monday morning journal entry, and I don't know that the couple of amusing anecdotes are going to be worth the effort of reading it. Up to you, I suppose. I won't be offended if you just give it a miss.

So, let's start with... Where shall we start? Well, let's start with the thing that lasted all weekend, colored every perception, and, in fact, is still happening: I have a cold.

Well, a minor cold, or a major allergy fit. I'm not sure. It's been a while since I've had either. I spent all day Friday suffering from a bad case of post-nasal-drip sore throat. Which is to say, it wasn't as bad as strep throat - I could still swallow - but by the end of the day, I was losing my voice. (Remember all that work I said I'd have to do Friday? Yeah. None of it even crossed my desk until after 2pm. I left work nearly two hours later than usual.)

By Saturday it had moved back into the front of my head, so my throat got a little relief, but I was going through Kleenex like crazy. Oh, and those of you with allergies will no doubt understand what I mean when I say that my sore throat had healed to the point that it merely felt like a really dry patch. Unfortunately, that sensation means that I'm constantly swallowing and trying to soothe the "dry" patch with liquids, when in fact it's just a raw spot that requires time to heal. At least I was remaining hydrated.

Sunday was better than Saturday, but not much. Being awake was far better than being asleep. I couldn't stay asleep for more than two hours at a clip, all weekend. But I'll get to the sleep later.

So, next... All right, my darling readers, if we have learned anything at all about Liz in the last five years of this journal, it is that she: a) secretly wants to be a ballerina; b) is an enormous fan of gangsta rap; or c) is totally and irrationally terrified of spiders, both living and dead.

Very good, everyone who picked C! Everyone else, it's time for a little remedial reading. (For more spider stories - for lo, there are many - go to the journal entry page and type "spider" into the Google search box.)

So. You'll be relieved to know - at least, I was relieved - that no actual spiders made any appearances this weekend. But this started on... Thursday, I guess, when K.T. reported on IRC as we were chatting that there was a golf-ball-sized spider in her hallway. Kevin, she promised, had Dealt With It.

The next morning when she logged in, she said, "Kevin is a liar. That spider he killed? Sterling [their cat] was playing with it in the bathtub when I got up." She had done the job properly, she said, and flushed the carcass down the toilet just to Make Sure. Kevin swore, when she talked to him later, that he'd killed the thing, but perhaps it had only been playing dead until he dropped it into the trash.

(Foolish Kevin. Spiders come back from the dead. Everyone knows this. You have to flush the corpses if you don't want them coming back.)

I was, of course, enormously creeped-out by the whole thing, and I knew my butt would cringe the next time I had to go to the bathroom at K.T.'s, but it was over. She'd flushed it. K.T. wouldn't lie to me about my phobia. So I joked, "Well, either that or you're having an Invasion Of Unreasonably Enormous Spiders, in which case I'm not coming into your apartment on Saturday to edit."

Surely, you can see where this is going.

Saturday afternoon, when we'd been editing for about twenty minutes and were taking a stretch-break, K.T. said, "Oh, by the way, I guess we are having an Invasion. I found another one of those spiders this morning. But don't worry! They've all been down there in that stretch of hall."

If I could have levitated, I would have. I tried to convince myself that they were not gathering in an army back there specifically to attack me. We continued editing, and finished, and not a single enormous spider came out to terrorize me. I did, however, start drinking my soda much slower so that I wouldn't have to use the bathroom back there. (Kevin is back on night shift this month, and was sleeping, or I'd have used the other bathroom, in the bedroom.)

Come time for the game Tuesday, I'll be using the master bathroom, you can damn well believe. No, I don't particularly care if no more spiders make an appearance between now and then. They're canny. They're just lying in wait for me. I know.

So much for the spiders.

There were a stack of other things. It rained off and on most of the day Friday and Saturday. I managed to burn not one but both hands as I was taking the pizza out of the oven Saturday night. Right across the knuckles. K.T. had an insulin episode Saturday night that worried the rest of us. (Yeah, Saturday could definitely have been better.) I tried about eight times to download a single updater file for my iPod's software, and it continually bombed out just as it was reaching the end of the download.

And on top of it all... Sleep. No sleep. At least, not much.

I mentioned I was sick, right? I went to bed early Friday night, like 10 or 10:30. No good. I woke up every two hours, almost on the spot, because I was unable to breathe, or because breathing through my mouth (and snoring, as Matt told me the next day) had made my mouth dry out to the point where it was painful. And then I woke up at about 6 Saturday morning and stayed awake.

Saturday night I went to bed a bit later, but it was the same deal - up every two hours to blow my nose and/or go to the bathroom and/or have a drink of water to desperately attempt to rehydrate the inside of my mouth. At least I slept later, Sunday morning. I was awake by eight, but I stubbornly stayed in bed and dozed until after 10.

And last night... Oh, that was the fun one. Between a Hall session that ran late and some, ah, digestive distress, I didn't get to sleep until after 1. Wonder of wonders, I slept more or less soundly. At least, back to usual.

And then at 4:30, the cat came upstairs to have a hairball. Why he couldn't have his hairball downstairs, preferably on the linoleum, I have no idea. But it's one of those noises that penetrates the sleeping mind like no other. Matt and I were both instantly awake. And then the cat started clawing at the matress. Matt got up to take the cat back downstairs and shut him in the bathroom. I got up to use the bathroom.

I went back to bed. I was still awake when Matt came back up and looked around for the hairball so he could clean it up. (He didn't find it. We still have no idea where it is. There was an amusing moment this morning after Matt got out of the shower and was walking around the room looking into corners and muttering, "If I were a bit of cat pukey, where would I be...?") I was still awake when he got back into bed.

I was still awake half an hour later when he stopped twitching and dozed off. I tried laying on my back, but that's only comfortable for about five minutes. I tried laying on my left side (where I'm supposed to be, according to all the baby books). As usual, it took about ten minutes for my left hip to go numb. I turned over onto my right side. I couldn't breathe. I finally got mostly comfortable, and the baby started to kick. Hard.

I really didn't want to wake Matt up, but he has this effect on the baby... Seriously. The baby's been kicking hard enough to feel for about three weeks now, but every time Matt touches my stomach, she decides it's time for a nap. He finally got to feel her move, for the first time, this weekend - and that was just two little weak kicks before she dozed off again. So I rolled over again, into another position where I couldn't breathe, just so I could rest my belly against Matt's back.

Matt woke up from his doze. "You okay?" he asked.

"Can't sleep," I answered. "Baby kicking. Needed your calming power."

"The Paternal Power of Calming," he murmured.

The baby calmed almost immediately. (I only hope he retains this power after she's born.)

But I still couldn't breathe. I turned over again and hoped she would stay asleep. My stomach growled, three times. I suppose it could pass for a cock crowing. I looked at the clock.

5:50.

"Christ, I muttered.

"What's wrong?"

"I want to sleep."

So, to wrap up what is an entirely too-long whine... Sick. Freaky annoying things. Less than four hours' sleep last night. Yeah.

Is it Friday yet?

--Liz