Ooooooooooooooooh! Ouf! Awwwwwwwwwwow!
Achooooo! Aaaahhhhchoooooo!
*cough* *cough* harummmmph hhhgmmmmm!
Bleh.
It's that time of year again.
The weather has changed. First came cold and rain, followed by warmer and drier with sunshine--but different from summer. We've started using the heat again. Days are shorter. The leaves are still green, but you can feel that they are beginning to think of changing color.
School has shifted into standard gear. Everyone has had a chance to use and cough on all the materials in the classrooms at least once. And of course Josefina has hugged and kissed each of her classmates dozens of times.
So we've got "that Fall Thing."
It is an acute affliction of varying degrees. That means, in our house, that Lucia gets it worse than anyone else. Poor dear spent two days home from school, moaning, propped on pillows. She's still moving slowly. Agnese was home for a day with a temperature and difficulty speaking. Josefina has had congestion in her chest, and has been using her albuterol nebulizer. Teresa seems alright, and John Paul and Mommy appear to be too busy to get sick. Though all of us have let out an occasional cough, hack, or harrumph.
Then there's me. Drag, drag, drag. Headache. Sleepy, sleepy, sleepy. Cough and grouchy throat. Blah. It's nothing more than a mild cold. Hardly even worth noticing. But there is the overriding atmosphere of "Blah" that is especially oppressive for a personality like mine, inclined to melancholy and further burdened with neurological and emotional imbalances.
So everything is slow right now. The blog is slow. It's a whole day late.
I'm running into a bit of a mood dip. I can't let it get to me. I have to stick to my routine, keep all my pots simmering, stay with the Lord in prayer, and soldier on even if it's a little more slowly over the next few days.
I don't like the shorter days, or the fact that winter is approaching. On the other hand, I'm into the final quarter of what has been an unusually fruitful year, and there is hope for the future. So if I have been slowed down for the moment, perhaps I should take this elongated sense of time and fill it with gratitude for many blessings.
