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frozen stomach contents
Sunday, December 21 2025
I had occasional coughing spells overnight as I tried to dislodge stubborn remnants of phlegm that were deep down in my bronchial tubes causing tickles, audible noises, or fluttering I could feel. But the work required to bring them up was exhausting and also seemed to risk reviving the sore throat I was very happy to be rid of.
That said, I was feeling much better today, and was even able to spend a fair amount of time in the laboratory (though I'd also been able to work there a little yesterday evening). True, a fair amount of that time was spent on the beanbag watching YouTube videos and I've yet to return to my microcontroller work.
Honestly, though, I had more hopes for today, but I kept falling asleep on the couch in the teevee room and then another precious hour (or more) of the day would pass. Later when I was back on the laboratory beanbag, I felt chilled in a way that suggested a fever. So I took my temperature ad was horrified to see it was back up to 99.7 again. I'd though that monster was well and truly dead. (After some consultation with ChatGPT, I learned that such mild fever can persist for awhile while one recovers from the flu.)
Gretchen took a shower and then I took a bath, and this time I managed to towel off after I got out without getting anywhere near puking or passing out. I then plunked down with Gretchen to watch the movie she was watching, Stand By Me (another entry in her Rob Reiner nostalgia tour). It's not the kind of film I would've ever seen before. I joined the viewing a little before the River Phoenix character tells his amazing story about Lard Ass Hogan at a local pie-eating contest. To exact his revenge on everyone for being taunted about his weight, Lard Ass has doctored his guts with a big bottle of castor oil and (for some reason) a raw egg before entering the competition. Inevitably he vomits on another contestant, which results in a chain reaction of vomiting among the contestants and viewers, all of whom appear to have been eating the same purple material. I much preferred Stand By Me to A Few Good Men, though Gretchen noted that she'd found this film much less entertaining.
Since that other bath a couple days ago, I've been aware of some sort of rash on the backside of my testicles. Usually such rashes are fungal in nature and start off itching. But this one had gone straight to angry points of pain (which were, for obvious reasons, difficult to visualize). I suspect this was the result of all the sleeping on the couch I've been doing, which means never sleeping on my stomach, the only sleeping posture that allows that part of my body full access to air. I'd treated the rash with the salve I put on athlete's foot (all these fungi are essentially the same!), but then it had spread to my taint and even my ass cheeks. So today I used a bit more salve, and this time it seemed to work. Within hours I was no longer reminded of the rash every time I moved a certain way.
This evening Gretchen, who was now decidedly sicker than I was (though not anywhere near as sick as I've been during this illness), offered to fetch me something to eat while I was noodling around on my red-topped Chromebook on the teevee room couch. I said sure, and said leftover spaghetti with just red sauce would be perfect. We then proceded to watch an episode of Jeopardy! followed by the seventh episode of Pluribus. That's the one with almost no dialog in it; it's just our heroine singing old pop songs as she pisses away her time alone, doing things this shooting off fireworks or destructively hitting golf balls into glass windows. Meanwhile, one of her fellow survivors of the apocalypse is driving up from Paraguay, and he has even less trust of the people taken over by the hive mind than our heroine. Ultimately he runs aground in the Darién Gap, though the pod people have been watching, and a rescue helicopter is sent. Meanwhile up in Albequerque, our heroine has painted a large message on the street out in front of her house in white paint. We don't see what it says until after a heartbreaking scene where the pod person sent to chaperone her (and whom our heroine nearly killed with an injection of truth serum; an event that caused the members of the hive to evacuate the city) returns and our heroine collapses against her in relief that she has returned. The painted message says simply "COME BACK." I don't know if it's that my emotions are heightened by illness or what, but it was all I could do to keep myself from bursting into sobs as I watched that. (Yesterday I'd been similarly affected by a YouTube video that I couldn't even watch to completion, a true crime piece featuring surveillance camera footage of a robbery where two toddlers watch as their parents and perhaps a puppy are brutally murdered by robbers disguises as UPS delivery men. But that had induced a feeling in my body that felt more like a powerful — and not entirely unpleasant — drug.)
This evening before snuggling up on the teevee room couch for the night, I thought I'd go downstairs to where Neville was on the living room couch and cover him up with a blanket. We hadn't run the woodstove in days and I was worried about him being cold. But when I went to do that, he started growling, and I looked to see what he was guarding this time. To my horror, it looked like a frozen cow flop. But on closer inspection, I realized it was probably the stomach contents of a deer, likely the same deer that Neville had gotten that leg from the other day. Charlotte had also shown up with a leg at some point, and it's likely a dead deer is what the dogs have been frequenting over in A's field. The material was brown and full of fibers and about the size of a large sandwich. I had Gretchen come down to help me get the stomach contents away from Neville so he wouldn't feel compelled to guard it anymore and it wouldn't melt into a liquid on our nice couch blanket (to do this I used a pair of old frying pans that Gretchen recently replaced). As I was taking the nasty material outside to put on top of the bluestone barbecue structure so Neville couldn't get to it again, I stumbled over a second mass of frozen stomach contents that had broken off and been left just outside the pet door.
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