We’re back in the personal mode for tonight. Good news and bad news tonight.

The bad news (I always start with the bad news) is that today has been a pretty rough day for me, health wise.

It started with lunch. I was happily eating lunch when suddenly it felt like the bottom fell out of my stomach and left a morass of aches and acid in its wake. Just like that, I went from feeling normal to feeling ill.

And that was bad. But I have had Irritable Bowel Syndrome for twenty years now, and so I am somewhat prepared to handle these little upsets. They don’t get me down. I just go to the bathroom and get rid of whatever I can get rid of, then relax in bed with the fan pointed at my forehead and do my best to drain my sinuses and make sure my ears are not clogged.

Seems weird, but those two things, sinuses and bowels, are intimately connected with me. Somehow.

Anyhow, I did all that and my tummy felt better eventually, and so I did the sensible thing and went to sleep. I figured that what I was dealing with was a run of the mill IBS attack and resolved to make sure I didn’t eat too fast in the future.

But when I woke up from my nap, my body was loaded with aches and pains. The only part of me that didn’t hurt was, ironically, my head. Everything else ached, especially my joints, but also in the major muscles of my arms and legs, in the pit of my stomach, and in the back of my neck.

This was way worse. I was feeling pretty lousy. That kind of pain really makes life miserable. That is bad enough for a healthy person but for someone like me with depression, it was a constantly struggle not to let the pain push my mood into a really dark and bad place and just weather it.

Luckily, I remembered that I had a huge bottle of acetaminophen, and took a fat dose of it (2000 mg, or 2 grams), then eventually also remembered that I still had that Volteran joint pain remedy gel stuff too, so I applied it to the worst places for pain, and it seemed to help somewhat.

The really weird and worrying thing is that after a little while, I realized that the pain was far more severe on my right side. I have no idea what that means. But it was exactly like I was in one of those ads where they treat half of the body with Brand X and half with Awesome Brand.

The aches and pains are still there even now, but thank goodness, they are far less intense.

I have two theories (of course I have theories) as to WTF is going on. One is that I have contracted something flu-ish and the aches and pains are just the first symptoms to arrive on the scene. It’s the wrong time of year for the flu and I have had summer head colds before and they never came with muscle and joint pain before, but it is still possible.

My main theory, however, is that the heavy amount of pollen in the air today (from the landlord FINALLY cutting the grass after letting it grow to about two feet high) triggered a very severe allergic response in me, which in term set off a body-wide inflammatory response which I felt as aches and pains in my muscles and joints.

If so, the good news is, that can be fixed with time and antihistamines, as well as more anti-inflammatory acetaminophen.

And speaking of good news, I finally got my order of sugar free candy today. It had been held up because they were out of one of the things I ordered, and I needed to give them permission to substitute something else.

So candy in hand, despite my pain, I tried out a few of them in the cotton candy machine. I tried out starlight eppermint, lemon, and orange.

Starlight peppermint is apparently just Russel Stover’s fancy pants way of referring to those round peppermints with a sort of pinwheel of red on a white background. It was pretty good as cotton candy, although getting, as it were, two entire peppermints at once via the cotton candy, the result was rather curiously strong.

The lemon was quite nice. Again, a little on the strong side, but still a wonderful little bit of lemon fluff.

But my fave was the orange. I have always liked orange flavoured things like candy or Popsicles and the cotton candy form of that artificial orange flavour was wonderful. Like a whole orange Slurpee all at once.

I still have a bunch of other flavours to try, including four Jolly Rancher flavours. There’s apple, grape, cherry… and WATERMELON. I love watermelon very very much, in both artificial and natural form, and watermelon is hands down my all time favorite flavour of Jolly Rancher, so I am stoked.

I will save that one for last for sure!

I did get somewhat depressed about the whole thing, probably from the pain. I found myself wondering why the heck I had paid fifty bucks for such a ridiculous toy that will just end up joining the breadmaker and the slow cooker that I never use any more and are just collecting dust now.

But that’s a “me” thing. I have trouble accepting the transient and I am always looking for things that last. Even if all I get is a month’s fun out of the cotton candy machine, that’s still a month more fun than I would have had without it, right?

And if I am willing to admit that I will never use them again, I could easily sell the slow cooker and the breadmaker and recoup some of my losses.

Whether I keep them or sell them or give them away, though, the last thing I should be doing is letting inanimate objects make me feel guilty because I lost interest in them.

I mean, how fucked up is that?

See you tomorrow, folks.