Ain't No Fun

Somethings I just don't understand and are just not fun at all. I'm sick again and I don't get it.

I've never been someone that gets sick that often and my body heals itself pretty well. But this is the third or fourth time this year that I'm sick. My throat is sore, and my nose is stuffy. It seems like every time I start to get better and go back to class, bam! I'm sick again.

I'm not sure if it's that I'm not sleeping enough, or that I've never warm here. But something is off and I just can't get healthy. I cannot wait until the temperature around here heats up and I feel warm in the mornings. I miss having a heating system that works well so I don't get cold overnight, waking up like I was hit in the face with a 2x4. Ugh.

I promise that soon I will have some good stories and pictures about our trip to the south. Aside from getting sick again, it was a great trip. I know they won't read it, but thanks to the faculty for putting together such a good trip. It was a lot of fun.

"Winter"

I know that I'm not going to get any sympathy from anyone reading this in North America. They're having a brutal winter. But I honestly miss it, this is not winter at all and I'm a bit sick of it.

In January we finally started to see the "fall foliage". Some of the trees were showing yellow and browns. Some of the trees were shedding their leaves and it felt a bit like fall. But it was a few months late.



We had a few days of rain but it hadn't been nearly enough at the start of the winter. This is a scary thought because it would ruin the Israeli agriculture for the next year. But in the last week or so the "real winter" hit us. By that I mean, here comes the rain. It rains just about every day and the soggy cold is just annoying.

I have a twenty minute walk to and from school and in the rain it is just miserable. Wind in my face half of the walk to school and half of the walk home. Yeah, the temperature is still a decent 50 something Fahrenheit, but in the rain and wind that's pretty miserable. And here is the kicker, these buildings are not made to hold heat.

Our apartment doesn't have central heating, most of them don't have that here. So the only way to get relief from the chill is to sit near a heater that is running. Luckily we have three space heaters in our apartment, one for each of the larger rooms in the place. The problem with that is our wiring. The wiring in this apartment seems to be pretty poorly done.

We can't have two heaters on and turn on the electric tea-kettle or the water heater in order to take a shower. We're not really using that much electricity at one time, except that the heaters are such an energy hole. More on that on a later post.

On top of that, I have a wicked cold that will not go away.

I don't get sick that often, so this is pretty annoying. I have a congested nose thing and a cough every morning. It takes a cup of tea along with my coffee to clear myself up in the morning. To say nothing for trying to get ride of the headache. Ugh. I just want the cold in my body to go away along with this disgusting chill outside.

Man I miss real winter.

Finally Better

It's actually amazing what 10 to 13 hours of sleep per night can do for you.

My normal daily routine here gets me up around 6:30 in the morning so I can get a little stretching and if I'm lucky some Yoga in before I cook breakfast and shower. As the year has gone on, it's been easy to not get up for all of that, and instead pop up around 6:30 so I can go over some notes, a reading or polish a homework assignment before running to school. Trying to get there early so I can have some coffee, organize my stuff or what have you before class starts.

That's the plan every day. What complicates this is the fact that I'm usually up until at least midnight working on homework or talking to people back in the states. Thus, waking up at 6:30 is difficult and my great morning plans don't usually work out the way I want them to and I end up wandering into class about two minutes early since I "speed-walked" my way to school to get there on time.

However, I started to get a cold last week and I found myself missing the services and my first class on Thursday, sleeping in through the bus to go to Qumran on Friday, sleeping late on Saturday and again not getting up until after 11:00 this morning. Not a good way to start the week before exams, right?

I guess I needed it.

I'm not a person who likes to takes medication unless I need to in order to make life happen. I'm glad i've been medicating myself with rest and about a gallon of herbal tea. I finally feel good for the first time since Tuesday last week. Maybe I've been running myself too hard, maybe I need a little more sleep on a regular basis. Maybe I just finally caught the cold/sickness/mono/crud/exhaustion that's been going around our program.

I've honestly spent a total of an hour outside my apartment since Thursday night. That includes a trip to the grocery store so I could make myself soup for dinner, lunch and dinner. I'm going to keep resting today, working on assignments for classes this week and towards finals.

Who knows, maybe next semester I can keep my normal schedule better.

That Time of the Year

Every year in college, right around finals, I would start to get a bit of a cold. I would chalk it up to the fact that I tend to run myself ragged. The weather changes for the colder and I usually catch a nice little cold. Once finals are finished I usually crash into a bed with a nice little cold and take a few days away from the world.

Nothing is different this year, except one thing. I'm not to the end of finals week yet. I'm still two weeks away from starting them. And being that this whole grad-school thing is a little tougher than working on my undergraduate degree, I have been trying to get a jump start of studying for exams. Here is where everything get's a little bit more complicated.

I've got a cold now. Yeah, yeah. A common cold is nothing that should knock me down, and I'm not looking for pity from anyone. But I've had an excruciating headache and have been incredibly sensitive to light. The last few days, I've been unable to get out of bed before 10:00 AM. It's been nice getting a fuller night's sleep each night, but I'm not a fan of being sick like this.

I'm hoping the soup I had for dinner, mixed with glasses upon glasses of tea will help get this crud out of my system and I can take on finals at full force as soon as possible. Ugh.

I wish there was better stuff going on right now to write about. But it is what it is.