I woke up today feeling lousy with flu symptoms. I thought maybe if I go to Bikram, I'd feel better. I decided not to go because if I did have the flu, I might pass it on to others. After a few hours, it was clear that exercise wasn't going to improve anything.
About midmorning, I called Kaiser for the nurse advice option. Yes, flu symptoms are a side effect of the shingle's booster. I hadn't had a reaction to the first one. I was told it was unusual for someone to have trouble with the second.
Besides the flu symptoms, I had a bad headache. It was late afternoon before I thought to take a Tylenol. That worked. I was finally able to get up off the sofa/love seat.
My home has been looking more and more like a construction site, well, a work in progress. Mike would have been very unhappy with a mess, and it's starting to make me unhappy. I spent some time organizing and doing surface cleaning to create some neat spaces.
I have never been good at surface neatness. When I organize, I start in the basement, if there is one. I begin with the hidden spots: the back of closets, drawers, or some rarely seen corners of the house. Mike was the surface organizer.
When we were living in Princeton, there were times when I would spend the whole day cleaning the kitchen. Mike would come home in the evening. Without taking off his coat, he would move his briefcase from his right hand to his left and rearranged items on the surface of the counters. His touch made the room look cared for, neat, organize.
I've probably told the following story before somewhere in this blog. Fifteen or twenty years into our relationship, Mike approached me and said, "I like things neat; you leave things messy. Being neat is better than being messy." I replied, "This is a marriage. I have as much right to my neurotic need for disorder as you do for your neurotic need for order." Over the years, I learned to be neater. Mike learned to have a higher tolerance for my mess versus his (yes, he did create some occasional mess) and find ways to straighten up after me without violating my boundaries. He would ask me if he could put something away or throw something away. I appreciated his consideration of my boundaries-deeply. I also enjoyed his straightening things up, so they looked better- deeply. God, I loved that man.
In the late afternoon, Scott showed up to install the motion detector outside light. Instead of putting it at the corner of the building leading to the back yard, where there was no existing electrical fixture, he installed it in the light by my side door. He angled the motion detector to pick up someone going through the gate leading to the back. We have it set to startle, nothing more.
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