Still Sick Ramble

Hi Everybody!

It seems like everyone really liked my post yesterday because the view count was through the roof. I ended up making vegan lasagna to celebrate my one year being vegan and I've been eating the leftovers today since my Dad wasn't too fond of the tempeh (I'd never put it in lasagna before, but it was really good).

So this post is a ramble post because I'm having trouble getting pictures to load for my next NC trip update and I'm on too much cough medicine to want to think about numbers to do my Walk to Mordor updates (I've missed several somehow... I'm not sure how they got away from me again).

I'm still sick.

Not anywhere near as bad as last week, but still sneezing and coughing and feeling woozy from the cough medicine I have to take. My mom is absolutely convinced that I'm sick because I am not getting proper nutrition, but I think I just got worn down and caught a cold at Kanuga.

I'm not sure if I have mentioned Kanuga before in posts, but it is this really awesome Episcopal Conference and Retreat Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina. I've been going there at least one week every summer since I was one (except the year my brother was born and my mom was on bed rest). I really love it there, and I had a lot of fun seeing my friends that I don't normally see. I was super bummed to get sick while I was there because it cut down on the number of things I felt like doing (I really didn't want to go hiking when it was hard to breathe). I did still have fun and I learned a new card/board game from my friend Lauren and her dad that was called Sequence. I even played in a trivia game (we lost horribly, but it was good fun) and used my knowledge of Stevie Wonder songs and Disney to help us get a few points.

I had a really fantastic chat with my friend Lauren on our last night there and we were talking about emotional vampires. You know the people I'm talking about: you seem to spend all your time and energy with them or on them or about them and it drains you until you crack. I had a friend who did this to me in school and it took me a long time to recover. I am a pretty giving person. I just like to do things for people because it makes me happy. At that time, I was giving so much of myself that I had not time that was not about this other person. My entire day was planned around making her happy and I didn't ever think about myself. I ended up having an emotional breakdown in the middle of a school building and leaving school, only to return a week later after being diagnosed with depression. It wasn't a really great time in my life. Now looking back on it, I am grateful that it happened because I can stop it from happening again and completely wrecking me.

When I'm sick I spend a lot of time thinking because it is hard for me to concentrate enough to read. Like two days ago: I read a story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes then spent five hours on Wikipedia after I looked up South Africa in the 1890s. Yep. Five HOURS. I can now tell you all about the genocide of pygmies in Africa, Animism, scientific practices in the Renaissance, Alchemy, Newton, Hermeticism in Literature, the Golden Dawn, Gypsies, Palmistry, Cold Reading, Dragons in literature, Honey Bees, Voodoo, and Butterflies. Those are just the ones I remember. Wikipedia is dangerous because you can get sucked in until you literally spend all night going from one article to the next. I'm not sure I'll ever need to know about pollination in that great detail, but I now know about it. This is why it is taking me FOREVER to read these short stories. I guess it is good for my general knowledge, but not for actually finishing the books.

Like I said earlier, this is a ramble. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm going to take some more medicine and go to sleep. Talk at you tomorrow!