Laura’s Did-Nothing Journal.

I dreamt I was outside talking with Mom when we happened upon an old lady lurking through the woods, dragging a plastic trash bag behind her. The lady was plucking softball-sized cotton balls out of the conifers. The squirrels and assorted small woodland creatures depended on these cotton balls to survive winter, and this crone was picking at their chance for survival. Mom was displeased by this lady’s actions but unwilling to say or do anything. Mom was one of those: a complainer, not a doer.

Fuck it. I boldly marched up to the lady, poked holes in her bag with my index fingers and ripped the bag apart, allowing the cotton balls to tumble out. When I hurried back to Mom, I could see the disappointed look on her face. She was not happy about what I’d done. Mom was so disappointed in me that she refused to speak to me. I tried to make sense of this.

Then I woke up and looked at the clock:

IT WAS 1:45PM.

The shot of NyQuil I’d taken the night before zonked me out so hard that I slept for more than 15 hours! I had three messages on my phone from Jordi, each about three hours apart, going, “Hello?” I also had a few messages from the roomie, with the last one going, “Are you alive?”

My response was a stupefied, “Holy crap.”

Last weekend didn’t go as planned. I had many tasks listed in my to-do journal that I was excited about crossing off: Swim! Buy more protein powder from the Walton Boutique! Sew projects! Reactivate my Zwift subscription!

None of that got done. My weekend began on Thursday morning: I woke up with a suspiciously gentle cough. The urge to cough was there, yet nothing had started up yet. Jordi had already been sick for four days and texted me asking me to ride to his friend’s place to check up on their cat as he’d decided to go in to work for the day. I had my swimming gear on the bed, ready to be smashed into my backpack. Instead, I looked up the public swimming timetable for Friday and decided to bump my hour of chlorinated power a day later in case I was getting sick.

I rode my beater bike out to Esquimalt to hang out with a large, fluffy cat named Carter. Chirpy lady. Professional biscuit maker. I lay on the couch and insulated myself with a thick fleece blanket. Carter promptly jumped on me and started kneading away. It wasn’t long before I was fast asleep. When I woke up an hour later, it was official: I was sick.

The past five days (and nights) have been primarily dreamt up. I even woke up at 2 this morning hallucinating: just shapes and colours. I guess I’d slept so much that the complexity of my dreams had degraded from being the saviour of woodland creatures (to my mother’s chagrin) into… meaningless patterns.

Jordi’s COVID test result turned up negative, so I can only assume I don’t/didn’t have COVID. Whatever it was/is, it was just as bad as my previous bouts of COVID. I sweated through ten t-shirts in five days. Even playing Animal Crossing demanded more active brain cells than what was available. I spent a good chunk of my sick days in a fetal position so tight I took up a single cushion space on the couch.

I still must decide whether to mask up and drag myself to work tomorrow. My “weekend” starts again on Thursday, and I’d like to reinstate my To-Do Journal.

I built my new front wheel last week, so my bike is ready for the virtual world of Watopia. Hopefully, I’ll be well enough to finish Ducknana’s tricorne hat.