It’s cold out.  There’s an icy wind blowing in around my back door to prove it.

Sweet Hubby has gone to work at job # 2 for the day and it’s just me and Hurricane Owen today.

We both have colds again.

Nothing serious, just a nuisance.  For me the biggest irritant isn’t the cough, it’s the joints.  Anything that causes my immune system to become active at all seems to send millions of stupid little soldiers coursing through my system attacking anything in their path, whether it’s the invading virus, or say, my knee joints.  My immune system can’t tell the difference.

Interestingly, my sister has just been referred to a rheumatologist as well.  Between my two aunts and us, we could be a study group.   We seem to have something up with the women on this side of the family.  Maybe they’ll name a syndrome after us.  Something catchier than “Systemic Auto-immune disorder”.  I was whining to an ex-boyfriend, who opined that this was Karma’s way of balancing the scales a little, since without some small impediment, the Botari women would be a frightening force to be reckoned with.  (He’s the only one to have met all of us.)

Footnote: I have three significant “exes”.  I’m still friends with each of them.  (We lived across the hall from the most significant one for the first three years of our marriage.)  They all know each other.  They claim to have formed a support group.  They have invited my husband as well.  No one will tell me whether or not he accepted, but there’s a meeting I’d like to be a fly on the wall for! 

Owen is mostly still himself, just a lot snottier.  It has to be pretty serious to slow him down much.  Any parent of young children will tell you that under fives are capable of producing roughly twice the liquid volume of their little bodies in snot every hour.

All that aside, we’re still in our jammies, and may stay that way for much of the day.  There’s a tent set up in our “library” and a racetrack running through the living room.  I’ve cleaned out the deep freeze and the winter pantry into the slow cooker and added a cup of salsa, a bay leaf and a half bottle of some sort of very dark beer that someone left here. 

The results seldom suck.

I have no ambitious plan for the day.  Just me and Owen, hangin’ out.  I’ve really missed our Wednesdays since Sweet Hubby’s stupid boss took away his flex time and forced him back to working five 8 hour days instead of four tens.  We’ve had to put Owen in full time daycare, so now, even though I’m still home on Wednesdays, (*I* still work four tens) I’m home alone.  Don’t get me wrong, I usually need the rest, but I miss my private time with my son. 

So today is a bit of a treat.  We’re too sick to visit anyone-my mom has her surgery coming up on the 24th-she’s being intubated for dialysis, so we can’t risk giving her another cold…but not sick enough to be really miserable.  No, Christine, I’m not being cocky, you showed us what happens to cocky people this week!

So that’s it. 

If you’re looking for us, you know where we’ll be.

We may or may not answer the phone. 

I can’t reach it from the tent.