Blessed by the Potato

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday. That’s an exceptionally rare thing for me to do, in the literal sense. Metaphorically, I wake up on the wrong side of the bed fairly frequently: I often wake up grumpy, or too tired to function, or find little things annoying. But usually that happens when I still find myself on the side of the bed I went to sleep on, which is universally the side with my alarm clock. There have been a few times when, having trouble falling asleep, I’ve moved over to the other side (especially when I made my regular side all hot and sweaty). But then when I wake up on the “wrong side” it’s not really the same, because I consciously moved over there in the night. But yesterday, I woke up on the wrong side, and was actually pretty confused as to where I was and how I had gotten there, because that sort of nighttime wandering just doesn’t usually happen.

[Warning: graphic description of unpleasant bodily functions follow]

The day didn’t really get any better for me after that. I was violently ill with diarrhea, perhaps the worst I’ve ever had. I spent basically an hour and a half on the toilet, going a minute or two thinking that the worst was finally over, just to be hit by another round of cramping and liquid evil. I made it through the rest of the day okay after that, but had very bizarre stomach rumbles and painful cramps the rest of the day. Usually when my tummy makes noise it’s sort of a long, protracted grumble with many individual rumbles and gurgles within. Sort of a rum-ble-rum-b-b-b-g-g-g-le. These were like dinosaur calls. A single, loud, painful note that seemed to coordinate the actions of many different areas of my gut. More of a Wroooooooaaam. Very strange indeed.

I also found ants in the kitchen, after thinking we had finally gotten rid of them in the spring. This time they were where I had most feared they might show up: in the food cupboard. Before, they had been drawn to the sink area largely because of the drops of coke left in the cans I had piled up there — rinsing and disposing of the cans individually rather than stockpiling a half dozen to do at a time seemed to help the problem significantly, and chemical warfare seemed to drive the rest off. The sink invasion also seemed to be partly out of convenience: while we never quite pinpointed exactly where they were entering the kitchen, it appeared to be somewhere over on that side of the room. The food is kept in a cupboard on the other side, and had seemed safe… until yesterday. While we have been pretty good about keeping our dry goods in containers and not letting any cans leak, there was one thing we had overlooked: Christmas candy canes. There was a small stockpile of them in there, to serve as a source of emergency sugar if needed. Of course, they came to be in that stockpile because they were rejected from the decoration pile at the time they were in season, because each of them had in some way broken. A broken candy cane is, unfortunately, a candy cane that lacks a seal, because breaking the cane almost always involves breaking the plastic wrapped around it. And so it was that I saw a lone ant crawling out of the the food cupboard, opened the doors, and saw a dozen swarming around the broken ends of the candy canes.

Ugh.

Well, today that mess is all cleaned up and I haven’t seen any more ants. We were also treated to a nice thunderstorm last night (though the air is still pretty muggy today), and those storms for some reason can drive the insects crazy before they strike.