It has not been a Good Day.
Oct. 10th, 2004 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
framlingemFirst, the other bloody fish bloody up and died on me.
Then I had stomach cramps. I figured I'd probably better just try a glass of water rather than breakfast... apparently water was a bad idea.
Who throws up water when they've been perfectly healthy until shortly before hand? Me, apparently. I hadn't even chugged a pint of the stuff like I usually do (I get my eight glasses... four glasses at a time *g*). Nope. Delicate little, ladylike sips. It took me fifteen minutes to drink about a hundred mLs. Five minutes later, I'd estimate there was less liquid in me than there was before I had a drink. Not a good sign.
Food was out of the question, so I did a meme to give my stomach time to settle down, then parked myself on the couch with another glass of water (room temperature, guaranteed to be as non-irritating as possible), and drank it over the course of an hour. I swear that glass lost more to evaporation than it did to me. I drank another glass of water over the next hour, then decided to try diluted fruit juice - I was starting to get shaky, which is a Bad Sign.
It's been diluted fruit juice all day, and I had a sweet potato all picked out for supper and everything. I was really, really looking forward to that.
Hope I get better fast. I was going to order myself a pizza for Thanksgiving, but pizza may not be the best idea.
Only good part of today was interviewing Mum about gardening. See, my term paper in my Cultural Geography class is to either make a model of a non-Imperial Chinese city (cool, but I wouldn't know where to start, really.), or use gardens which are typical of two different places as a cultural landscape and analyse them in terms of what they say about the society (and evolution thereof) of that particular culture. Nick gave us a list of different types of garden, and I plan to contrast English with either Imperial Chinese (lots of bridges, water features, statues hidden in trees, large rocks) or Buddhist Japanese (large rocks, little rocks, littler rocks, all very carefully arranged and raked, with bonsai trees in pots). English and Japanese would be interesting, because while they look very different, there are actually a lot of underlying similarities to them (labour-intensive - but indicating different things! -, a very deliberate planning stage - for different reasons! - , extremely organised). On the other hand, I very much like Chinese style gardens, and have actually walked in a Forbidden City's garden (where some Chinese tourists wanted my friend and me to be in their pictures with them, because they'd never seen a westerner before - my friend is very tall, blonde, and blue-eyed).
At any rate, I learned a lot about English gardens that I didn't know already, and it turns out that one of Mum's college friends is now a professional horticulturalist with her own English 'country' garden (not, apparently, to be confused with an estate garden, a 'house' garden, or a rockery garden), and Mum has given me her email address so I can ask if I can ask her some questions. I also have a cousin Andrew who is a groundskeeper for an estate in Scotland, but have decided not to ask him questions as, while he knows a lot about gardening and is excellent at his job, he is not very good at explaining and gets embarrassed easily while talking, and does not write very well either and gets embarrassed about that. Very nice person, though, from what I've seen. (I haven't spoken with him very often. I was fifteen the last time I was in Scotland.)
Anyhoo... it's going to be a fun paper. Just from speaking with Mum I've got all sorts of theories about class structure, inter-nobility competition (neener neener, I've got more kinds of roses than you! Oh yeah? Well, I created a _new_ species of rose! Beat that!... as Mum put it, it's not so much keeping up with the Joneses as it is keeping up with the Smythe-Joneses.), Imperialism and Colonialism (it is very fashionable for the wealthier merchant class and nobility to have peacocks from India, golden pheasants from China, and all sorts of exotic fruit trees in the greenhouses), and patience. Fascinating.
Plus it takes one's mind off of the pain in one's gut.
Then I had stomach cramps. I figured I'd probably better just try a glass of water rather than breakfast... apparently water was a bad idea.
Who throws up water when they've been perfectly healthy until shortly before hand? Me, apparently. I hadn't even chugged a pint of the stuff like I usually do (I get my eight glasses... four glasses at a time *g*). Nope. Delicate little, ladylike sips. It took me fifteen minutes to drink about a hundred mLs. Five minutes later, I'd estimate there was less liquid in me than there was before I had a drink. Not a good sign.
Food was out of the question, so I did a meme to give my stomach time to settle down, then parked myself on the couch with another glass of water (room temperature, guaranteed to be as non-irritating as possible), and drank it over the course of an hour. I swear that glass lost more to evaporation than it did to me. I drank another glass of water over the next hour, then decided to try diluted fruit juice - I was starting to get shaky, which is a Bad Sign.
It's been diluted fruit juice all day, and I had a sweet potato all picked out for supper and everything. I was really, really looking forward to that.
Hope I get better fast. I was going to order myself a pizza for Thanksgiving, but pizza may not be the best idea.
Only good part of today was interviewing Mum about gardening. See, my term paper in my Cultural Geography class is to either make a model of a non-Imperial Chinese city (cool, but I wouldn't know where to start, really.), or use gardens which are typical of two different places as a cultural landscape and analyse them in terms of what they say about the society (and evolution thereof) of that particular culture. Nick gave us a list of different types of garden, and I plan to contrast English with either Imperial Chinese (lots of bridges, water features, statues hidden in trees, large rocks) or Buddhist Japanese (large rocks, little rocks, littler rocks, all very carefully arranged and raked, with bonsai trees in pots). English and Japanese would be interesting, because while they look very different, there are actually a lot of underlying similarities to them (labour-intensive - but indicating different things! -, a very deliberate planning stage - for different reasons! - , extremely organised). On the other hand, I very much like Chinese style gardens, and have actually walked in a Forbidden City's garden (where some Chinese tourists wanted my friend and me to be in their pictures with them, because they'd never seen a westerner before - my friend is very tall, blonde, and blue-eyed).
At any rate, I learned a lot about English gardens that I didn't know already, and it turns out that one of Mum's college friends is now a professional horticulturalist with her own English 'country' garden (not, apparently, to be confused with an estate garden, a 'house' garden, or a rockery garden), and Mum has given me her email address so I can ask if I can ask her some questions. I also have a cousin Andrew who is a groundskeeper for an estate in Scotland, but have decided not to ask him questions as, while he knows a lot about gardening and is excellent at his job, he is not very good at explaining and gets embarrassed easily while talking, and does not write very well either and gets embarrassed about that. Very nice person, though, from what I've seen. (I haven't spoken with him very often. I was fifteen the last time I was in Scotland.)
Anyhoo... it's going to be a fun paper. Just from speaking with Mum I've got all sorts of theories about class structure, inter-nobility competition (neener neener, I've got more kinds of roses than you! Oh yeah? Well, I created a _new_ species of rose! Beat that!... as Mum put it, it's not so much keeping up with the Joneses as it is keeping up with the Smythe-Joneses.), Imperialism and Colonialism (it is very fashionable for the wealthier merchant class and nobility to have peacocks from India, golden pheasants from China, and all sorts of exotic fruit trees in the greenhouses), and patience. Fascinating.
Plus it takes one's mind off of the pain in one's gut.
