Well, not fever really. But my tummy was upset earlier, and those of you who know me know that when I say “tummy” I really mean “lower digestive tract”, known at home as “the bowels”.

I suffer from IBS. For the most part, the symptoms are trivial and easily managed. But now and then, I get a flare up, and it is not exactly a fun time for all ages.

Nobody knows what causes IBS, though I expect a certain temperament plus a certain body type makes one more susceptible.

But it has a lot fo do with your nervous disposition and you diet and current emotional state and blah blah blah. Any time I have a serious emotional blow, I know my bowels will provide a highly unwelcome aftershock effect. If I have been eating the wrong things, that also can set off an attack. Such things include food that is too spicy for my (increasingly) (dammit) delicate digestion or things that are just too hard to digest, like Pho or beef jerky.

And I am increasingly convinced that it is related to the sort of low level inflammation that is making all the medical news lately as it might just be the root cause of a lot of extremely pesky medical conditions.

My anecdotal person evidence show a definite pattern of my bowels getting worse after I have had an allergy attack. And I had one last night. Sneezing, runny nose, and most tellingly, a sort of odd feeling of heat in my major muscles.

It is my theory that these attacks set off a body wide inflammatory response in me, with histamines going nuts everywhere, and ergo can cause a wide variety of effects like joint ache, dizziness, and of course, digestive difficulties.

If so, then I should really take my antihistamines all the time rather than just when I have had problems. Keeping my histamines happy might just make me a much happier person in the long run. That, and some Tylenol for inflammation.

Tonight’s festivities started after I went to the bathroom. When I got up off the porcelain throne, I felt okay, but by the time I had washed my hands and sat down in front of the computer, I knew something was a-stirring Down South.

Basically, I felt the sadly all too familiar feeling of being “backed up”. It’s a very distinctive form of nausea. Basically, somewhere along the line, my bowels/lower intestine cramps up and that causes everything from that point back up to the stomach to jam, and the body, quite correctly, makes sure I don’t add to the problem by making me nauseous.

Sadly, this all happened around 6:30 pm, and made me too nauseous to eat until 8, so I ended up eating supper way later than usual and my whole timing is thrown off.

Theoretically, I should be baking in an hour and ten minutes. But I don’t know if I will have the energy or not. Usually there is three or four hours between blogging and baking. Tonight I am lucky if I will get one. And I am still not feeling wonderful, although the ginger in the gingerbread I had earlier helped a lot.

Nothing like ginger for soothing an upset tummy. Back home, the folk remedy for nausea was flat ginger ale. You made it by taking a bottle of ginger ale, poking a tiny hole in the cap, then very carefully shaking the bottle. Thus, the carbon dioxide escapes and your ginger ale gets flattened.

Why ginger ale? For the ginger, of course. Why flat? Because bubbles are not good for upset tummies.

The good news is, of course, that I got over it. The bad news is that I now feel very tired. So it will be up to me to decide whether I bake in an hour or not.

I can’t imagine that I will feel like it. But then again, it’s not all about how I feel any more, is it? And it never should have been. So whether or not I feel like it is not nearly as important as whether I want to do it.

Those are not the same things.

And part of me definitely wants to do it. I never bake on Sundays (even God rested then) and so if I don’t bake tonight either, I will have gone two days without baking in a row and I worry that the necessary discipline that I have worked so hard to build will crumble if I go that long without reinforcing it.

And then you have to build the discipline of baking 6 days out of 7 AGAIN. And that sucks!

So I imagine I will end up baking tonight… nothing big, just biscuits, easy peasy… but I doubt it will be at 11 pm as is my custom. Probably a lot closer to 1 am, because after I finish here, I am taking a nap.

Or at least lying down with the lights out to rest my eyes. Too much staring at screens!

Started watching a show called Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. I’ve had it on my Netflix instant queue for a while now but hadn’t gotten around to watching it yet because its Netflix user ratings were pretty low.

Well those people are morons because the show is a lot of fun. Basically, the Hulk creates his own super hero team with Red Hulk, A-bomb (a Hulked up Rick Jones), Skaar (a Hulk from another dimension), and… wait for it… SHE HULK!

And admittedly, the animation style is a little over-shaded and jumps around a lot like a Michael Bay movie, but that works quite well in the big fight scenes. And it has a fun jokey wacky sense of humour about it which is more charming than funny but makes the whole thing more fun.

I have only seen the first two episodes which form, I think, a two-part pilot for the show, so it remains to be seen how it looks and works once they are on a smaller budget. Hopefully, that will result in them ditching the out of control shading (seriously, it’s like a deranged inker got hold of the cells) and using fewer camera moves.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.