My weekend didn't officially end till yesterday, and the only reason I say that is because I was unable to work. But lets start with Friday, shall we; one of the longest days I have had in a while on very little sleep. So last week my wife and son were in Florida and I stayed home to work on our stairwell/hallway. I had grand plans of getting it all done and painted plus a lot of other work done around the house that I can't really do with a 16.5 month old son around. After starting the week off ripping down the ceiling in the stairwell, I realized that my original plans would have to be scaled back tremendously in order for me to actually get my house back to livable conditions. So I focused on getting the stairwell/hallway ceiling raised 8 inches, re-studded, re-sheetrocked, taped, plus all the walls skim coated, new electrical run, insulation put in, and of course, sanded and primed. Well Friday was my 11th hour, the whole day actually. After my dart match on Thursday night which I didn't get home from until about 12:45 in the morning, I woke up at 4:00 to get to my Friday morning meeting. So I started Friday with a little over 3 hours of sleep. I got home from me meeting at around 9 A.M. and got right to work. I still had to skim coat a few walls one more time which took me up until lunch, after which I began the dreaded task of sanding. Starting at around 1, it took me 5 hours to sand all the walls that I had skim coated. With that done, I realized I had forgotten a rolling sleeve to prime the walls with, so I had to run to the trusty Home Depot down the road to grab one. On my drive, I realized that getting the new trim up would be impossible, so I focused instead on cleaning and priming. Before priming, I had to clean up from the mess I had made sanding. That took an hour or so after which I primed, finishing at 11 P.M. I wasn't done, though, as I still needed to clean one more time to ensure that all the dust I had created over the whole week was contained and not allowed to spread to the rest of the house. I wiped down plastic, I mopped floors, I vacuumed intensely, and finally finished at 1 A.M. Saturday morning...at which point I ate dinner and got to bed by 1:30. While my work area was cleaned up, I still wanted to clean up the rest of the house a little more, so I set my alarm for 3:30, 2 hours after I went to bed, and started vacuuming the rest of the house before I had to leave by 6:30 to pick up my wife and son at the Newark Airport, 1.5 hours away. And that was just the start of the weekend.
I picked up my wife and son from the airport, my wife exhausted from very little sleep the night before and my son doing quite well. After all was said and done including making a few stops on the way home, we arrived home around lunch time. Despite unpacking and attempting to return our lives back to normal, I really don't remember what happened during the early afternoon hours on Saturday. I do remember that my parents brought some dinner over for us around 4:30 so that they could see their grandson and of course my wife and I. Right around the time that my parents were on their way over, my wife started to really not feel well and it wasn't until my parents actually arrived that she had to run to the bathroom and empty the contents of her stomach due to a stomach bug of some sort. Well, that did her in for the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday. Saturday night was uneventful, despite my wife being laid up with the stomach bug, and I passed out early due to my 5 hours of sleep over the previous two nights. Sunday morning came and my wife wasn't moving from the couch that she slept on. While the stomach bug worked through her quickly, it left her weak and unable to do much of anything on Sunday. So I got to take care of our son and everything else around the house, which I had no problem doing because I actually got a good night's sleep. In order to let my wife get some rest, I took my son out in the afternoon to go visit his great grandparents. All told, we were out of the house for about 3 hours. The last hour involving me driving around while he slept. I actually enjoyed it because I got to meander through various back roads on my way home. We got home, I played with our son in his room for a little bit, had some chili with him for dinner, and my wife was able to feed him and get him to bed. Once he was in bed, I made soup for the week, did some dishes, and proceeded to collapse on the couch, drained not from lack of sleep, but from a day packed full of taking care of my wife, son, and house.
Around 1:30 in the morning, Monday morning, the stomach bug got me. To keep it so that everyone reading this doesn't get sick, let me just sum it up by saying it was coming out both ends, top and bottom with me. It started with the bottom and I had hopes that it would end with that. A few hours later, it started out the top and even after the first one, I thought I would make it through OK. However, by number four with nothing coming up, I knew I was down for the count yesterday. Luckily after number four, it stopped. I waited a few hours before starting to consume liquids, which I knew I sorely needed, and luckily they stayed down. I improved quite rapidly throughout the day to where I could eat solid foods 12 hours after the whole ordeal began. I then started chugging liquids because my lower back had started to hurt from dehydration. That, perhaps, is the worst part of getting the stomach bug for me is the dehydration and the lower back pain. It keeps me from sleeping, keeps me from staying comfortable, and to put it simply, it annoys the hell out of me. Even this morning, after downing tons of Gatorade and pedialyte, my lower back still hurts some, not nearly as bad as yesterday, but it is still aching. Such is life, I feel a hundred times better than yesterday morning and as such I will be going to work today. At this point I seriously hope that we are done with all sicknesses in our family for the rest of the year. Especially the stomach bug. I forgot how much I hate getting the stomach bug as I don't think I have had one in over 15 years. But, I have a young un in the house and I am bound to catch almost anything that he gets, just luckily not as bad. With my wife and son, they were both laid up for two days with the stomach bug, the first involving the vomiting, the second involving a fever. I never got the fever luckily. For now, I am done writing about my long weekend and need to get my son out of bed and my morning started. How about you? Have you ever had a weekend like the one I described?
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