The Voices in My Head

To be clear, I'm not hearing voices telling me to find the tallest building in Cumberland and go shoot people.  That is a good thing since it would be hard to do, as, I believe, the tallest building here is the hotel and it's maybe 3 stories high.  I also don't have a gun. I don't like guns, don't agree with civilians having them unless they are used for "working" purposes like protecting other people or hunting for food that will be consumed and appreciated - but that's another posting altogether.

I suppose I could go up to the roof and shoot paperclips at people using an elastic band (a small but useful skill I have developed) but that would be WAY too much work for me today.

No, the voice I am hearing in my head today is my Mum's voice - telling me that, if I am too sick to go to school (or in this case, work) I'm too sick to go out and do yard work. 

I don't take sickkies often - my parents raised (my brother and) me to work hard and to be honest.  Always. For me, this shows itself in the actual number of sick days taken and what I will allow myself to do on one. Today will be the second sick day taken in the past two years. It falls on a Saturday (which is the Friday of my work week) and so I will have three full days off, in a row, to get better. 

So what will I do for the next three days? Nothing I had planned, for starters!  Today I was going to drop off my recycling and see about getting a kitchen-sized trash can. Tomorrow Mum & Dad were going to bring Grandpa up to Cumberland to see my house and then later Sunday afternoon I had been going to have a guy come over with his truck to take a load of yard waste and such to the dump. Monday I had been going to Nanaimo to spend the day with Carrie and Finn. 

What I will actually do over the weekend will look more like puttering around indoors.  I'll take Jasmine out for some light walks, to be sure, but the bulk of my time will be inside doing inside things.  I still need to organize my home-office-come-spare-room... I would also like, very much, to organize some of the kitchen a little better. That will be about it though.  When I get sick, I run out of energy so quickly its scary - and have a tendency, if strained while sick, to get woozy & things go all hazy until I sit down and let my heart stop racing.

I'm grateful to be able to hear my Mum and Dad's voices in my head - and even more than that, I'm grateful to be able to pick up the phone and hear their voices (and the voices of my Brother and Sister-in-Law) over the wires. It's an awesome and very special thing (I think) that when I feel crummy - even at my fine age of (ahem) 40-something, what makes me feel safe, better and taken care of is hearing the voices of my parents - in my head or on the phone.

With love across the waters,