Winter, Houses, Viruses, Bacteria, More Winter

1) It was our birthday.  (The spouse, my sister Pru, and I all share a birthday.) My family brought cake and the dog.  The next weekend we left the kids with them for 24 hours.  It was glorious.  As we drove away, Bug asked "When can we go see Grandma and Grandpa again?"  and Tatoe said "I want Lily-doggie."

2) For my birthday, Bug gave me a belated case of pinkeye and Tatoe gave me a horrible cold.  The asthma is mostly okay except when I get a cold, and then I can't breathe* and then I can't sleep and... you get the idea.

3) This allergy thing, it is going to send me into a spiral of depression one of these days.  I continue to develop new food reactions** and then I feel like eating ALL THE CHOCOLATE, with a side of frightened and sad and angry.

4) We have now looked at... twelve?... houses in person.   One was too small.  One was too shoddily built. One was delightful and affordable and lovely and the owners had just taken an offer that day.  (SOB SOB SOB.)  Four were "Not just no, but HELL NO."  One had an impossible driveway that gave me vertigo on a warm, dry day.  One was a drive-up-and-drive-away.  One had lumpy drywall and was over-priced.  One was lovely and wonderful, but had nowhere to plant a garden.  The last one has a beautifully planted five acres, and is almost twice as big (3800 square feet - you could fit five Manhattan apartments inside!) as we actually want and they want waaaaay too much and it needs some work and we could maybe barely afford it and our car slipped on 1/4 inch of ice at the bottom of the enormous driveway and we would need a truck and an actual tractor and I just don't know.  Oh, also it is down a narrow, winding road with a steep dropoff.  Into a creek.   What's the use falling down a hill if you can't end up in a creek?  I can't tell if it's time to adjust my expectations downwards quite a ways, or hold out for spring house listings, or get in touch with that one builder, which idea frankly gives me hives.  Dr. S is happy to make them an offer tomorrow.  I need to dither first and stare at real estate listings for another few days first.***

4a) This is not the worst of choices to have to make.  We can stay in our crappy apartment for two more years if we want (I do not want).  It's not the end of the world, but at some point I would like to find my !@$% teapot and plant a garden again.  I've put my life on hold for six years while my spouse pursued his insane-seeming career ambitions and I'm quite ready to move on, to say nothing of unpacking the rest of those boxes, one of these days.

5) I need to exercise.  Then I would be less depressed and sleepless.  I cannot exercise, because I feel like I cannot breathe (exercise elevates it from a feeling of shortness of breath to a feeling of being stabbed in the lungs with many pointy knives; no amount of albuterol fixes this).   However, as we are now in the South, winter will be over in a month.  Thank the Lord and pass the brandy.

* More to the point, I feel like I can't breathe but have perfectly adequate pulmonary function and oxygenation and therefore nobody will do anything about it.  Which is perfectly reasonable, but doesn't help me when I wake up with a can't-breathe feeling in the middle of the night.
** I have the classical symptoms for a diagnosed condition.  Dear Readers, I know you mean well, but please do not suggest that I have something else.  I do not.  I have this thing and there is no treatment beyond allergy shots (and an unreasonable amount of antihistamines) and it sucks.
*** There are 23,000 people in this entire county.  The real estate market is not exactly booming.