I’ve spent the last two and a half days laying on my couch wishing I was comatose, or at least could stop coughing and shivering with chills and fever. But things finally began to break late this afternoon, and I’m starting to feel a little more like myself. It’s nice.

It was kinda crappy to be all feverish and chilling on New Year’s Eve. It was especially hard to go to church that morning. I hadn’t gotten much sleep since the fever started during the night. I ended up dozing through the sermon — and I didn’t even care. And I was on the second row.    HA! Guess that’s the good part of having a fever; you don’t have the energy to be embarrassed by your own actions.

Despite all that, I had a good New Year’s Eve celebration. We just hung out at my sister’s, ate good Christmas candy and watched the ball drop in New York at midnight. Much of the day was spent watching the second season of Lost, which, thankfully, doesn’t take much energy. Oh, and we watched the dogs go crazy with all the fireworks going off. They just didn’t know what to do with themselves; running from the front of the house to the back and then back again, searching in vain for the source of the crazy booms and barking at us to either set them free to find them or to shut them up ourselves.

And while we’re on the subject, what’s the deal with the South and shooting off fireworks all year round?? Every time I hear them I’m completely thrown off. They are illegal throughout most of Southern California, so it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around the idea that most cities/counties in the South allow people to own them and shoot them off whenever they want. I keep thinking of all the fire hazards and risks people are taking with every pop, whizzz and whistle/scream I hear. At the same time, I got very used to hearing gunshots during all my years in LA. You’d think those would  send me through the roof more than fireworks, but, hey, you hear them often enough,  you get desensitized to the sound. AND they do sound remarkably like a firecracker going off. So often, my first thought when hearing them in LA was that someone had set off a(n) (illegal) firecracker. It usually took a second for it to register it was gunshots. And like I said, I got pretty desensitized to it. I’d pray for the people involved, but rarely called 911 to report shots fired. Now, oddly enough, living here in the South, when I hear fireworks on any day other than the 4th of July, it’s really hard for me to remember that its fireworks, not gunshots, I’m hearing. And my first reaction is to pick up  the phone and call the police. Cuh-razy.

Well, I got off on a tangent there, didn’t I. Guess I’m still pretty much a cotton-head… Hope your week has been better.