out for the count

 yesterday was awful. it began sometime around 3am with me almost passing out any time i tried to use the loo, kinda like my experience a couple of years ago but actually worse. then it became really hard to breathe, i don't know how many hours i'd been gasping before i finally realized that taking a puff of gd's asthma pump might help (it did) and eventually that calmed down a bit. but i still felt terrible and for most of the day couldn't get up without severe dizziness.

so i spent all of yesterday and last night in bed, mostly drifting in and out of consciousness or reading mort for the first time in... two decades? this morning we all got up around 7.30, at which point my stomache was still in full grief mode but my mind felt clear for the first time in over a week.

mr smear and i went to get tested for covid, which was a lot less unpleasant that i expected (they're swabbing the back of the throat rather than going through the nose), and the worst part of the ordeal was missing an opportunity to take a video of a karen in the wild, who'd arrived without an appointment or a doctor's reference (everywhere explicitly stated as mandatory) and then demanded to see a manager (because she'd driven so far and demanding those things is clearly unnecessary).

i've got some work done today, which i'm happy with, and then after getting our new gamepad set up i played some shiftlings over lunch, and it is brilliant.

i'm almost ready to get back to work, so just one little mind-dump before i do so:

the other night i had a strange dream in which i watched a doll being torturously filled with fire ants, eventually having its mouth sewn shut and turned into a weapon.

i also had a dream recently in which sailor was trying to tell me something, but i couldn't hear him because i was laughing helplessly at a newspaper headline which mentioned the "wing bash shin hospital".