Thursday, September 06, 2012

The West Nile Dalek Tea Crisis

I may not be quite as old and decrepit as I feared from my lingering aches. Last night when I got home from choir, I was feeling weird, took my temperature and discovered that I was running what is for me a pretty high fever. This kind of feels like a really mild flu. I've got the fever, aches and a bit of a cough, but I'm still more or less functional, if miserable, and with the flu I'm generally not functional at all. I'd suspect West Nile virus, since that's supposed to be mild flu-like symptoms in healthy people, but I haven't had a mosquito bite in months -- and the way I react to mosquito bites, I'd know if I'd been bitten. Now I feel kind of bad that I went to children's choir and was around the kids -- and this time I can't blame them. I am glad that I went home after children's choir instead of staying for choir rehearsal. Choir rehearsal was starting later, so there was an hour and a half gap after the end of children's choir. I picked up some groceries on the way home, and then I just didn't feel up to going back again.

The kids were very happy to see me and were thrilled that I'm still their teacher. Working with small children is a good way to get an ego boost. However, I found that the other teacher is considering me to be in charge. She's there for crowd control and I'll be doing the lesson plans. They give us a pretty extensive curriculum. Some of it is pretty cheesy and apparently written by someone who's never seen an actual child, so I may need to come up with a few activities on my own. Time to start searching the Internet for music-related activities for small children. Last night was just the meet-and-greet, so we played a few songs that have activities that go with them. For this session, the parents and any younger siblings with them stayed in the room, and it was so adorable that a couple of the kids have infant siblings, and the babies were bouncing around with the music like they were part of the group. I'm now glad I didn't go near the babies, though I think maybe I should have known I was sick when I didn't feel motivated to go hold and cuddle babies. Even with my kids, I just got the hug around the legs and then had to admire the new school shoes and clothes. One kid brought the box label from his new Dalek toy to show me. I didn't have to feign enthusiasm for that one. I think I need a Dalek toy.

But I don't really have time to be sick now. I've got to get book 6 ready for publication (we're going over review copy requests today), I'm still writing book 7, and I've got PR stuff to do for FenCon, which is just in a few weeks. I think I'll put on a burst of speed this morning to get as much busy work out of the way as possible, and then collapse this afternoon. I'm not sure how good anything I wrote right now would be.

Oh, and I'm out of tea! Well, not entirely, since I have a whole cabinet full of tea. I just don't have any of my usual daily consumption tea. I'll have to resort to (gasp!) tea bags until I feel up to a hike over to the Indian market to restock. And then, of course, there all all the flavored teas. Fortunately, I did pick up a couple of cans of soup last night because I had a feeling I'd need them.

No comments: