(Censored)

I haven’t posted anything new for the past few days, because lately I just haven’t felt good.

I’ve been trying really hard to figure out how I can turn this into a funny story, but all of my brain space has been taken up by thinking about how badly I feel. If a little cartoon balloon appeared over me right now and let you see inside my head, it would just be filled with symbols like, “*!@*!!*^@&*” to disguise what I have actually been thinking.

It all started because I am currently in the middle of one of my “from-one-extreme-to-the-other” sleeping cycles. About three weeks ago, all I could do was sleep. I could not stay awake for more than a couple of hours. (Important Side Note: This is a perfect example of why I should not be allowed to watch shows like “House” on TV, because during this time I was absolutely convinced that I had African Sleeping Sickness, as opposed to, say, just being really tired from helping twelve people prepare for their final exam in Spanish.)

But now I have swung to the opposite end of the pendulum, and now I am always awake. I thought that maybe a new bedtime location might help ease my insomnia, so last week I tried sleeping on the couch to see if that was any better.

Um, not so much. All that did was painfully pull a muscle in my neck and cause me to walk around for the next three days with my head permanently turned to the left. That was fun, and not at all embarrassing.

In any event, I’ve had a lot of extra free time to fill up (due to the not sleeping), so I decided to spend some time outside in our garden.

Have you seen the “Simpsons” episode (Episode #284, “Blame It On Lisa”) where Lisa is sponsoring an orphan named Renaldo, and when the Simpsons go to Brazil to meet him they find him running down the street fleeing monkeys, because, as he explains it to them, “I am like candy to them [the monkeys]!”? Well, that is EXACTLY what happens to me when I go outside in the summer. Only with bugs, not monkeys.

My husband and I spent the weekend working in our yard, and today I look like I’m covered with some horribly disfiguring and highly contagious plague-like disease from Biblical times. Even my husband, who is a very calm, rational engineer rarely given to any kind of dramatic statement, looked at me this morning and said, “Oh, man!”

So if anyone needs me this week, I’ll be pretty easy to find. Just follow the hydrocortisone trail and the sounds of the TV to the living room, where I will be sitting, bolt upright and wide awake, surfing the channels to find the new, dramatic medical condition which features insomnia contracted from multiple mosquito bites.