laryngitis

My voice is completely gone today. Yesterday I woke up with a badly croaking voice and my left tonsil felt like a marble stuck in my throat. The marble feeling is still there, and my voice is completely gone now.

Lisa is feeling much better since the doctor changed her medication. Her pulse rate is closer to normal. We don't know what her blood pressure is, but as I said she feels much better. Her mother has one of those wrist BP checkers; Lisa bought it for her over the winter. We had borrowed it for a while a couple of weeks ago, but took it back because she needs to keep track of her own vitals.

I have promised Lisa that when I get a job, the first two things I'll get for her are 1) satellite television, and 2) a home BP checker. She goes back to the doctor tomorrow and says that if I'm still sick, she'll drive herself there. She's feeling well enough to do that.

At least it looks like it'll be a nice day today. Yesterday it rained pretty hard in the afternoon but I slept through most of it.

The satellite TV is fairly important to Lisa. She watches a lot of TV. Using a digital converter and rabbit-ear antenna, we get a maximum of five TV channels; WLOS-DT (ABC) and its local all-rerun associate WLOS-DT2, plus three public broadcasting channels.

Of the three PBS channels, one is strictly for children and of little use to a couple of middle-aged folks. The other two are the standard PBS and the PBS Explorer channel. There is usually something worthwhile to watch on one or the other, but reception for the PBS channels is problematic. It's not like the old analog TV channels, where you'd have to deal with a "snowy" picture when reception wasn't ideal. No, nowadays, it's digital TV of course, so if there is a signal integrity problem, the picture and sound will freeze or go away completely. And we're nestled snugly between two mountain ridges, so the signal for PBS is too imperfect to watch more often than not.

Our satellite Internet service has a data cap of 250MB per day. If we exceed that amount, the service slows down to a crawl but (fortunately) we aren't charged overage fees. I am able to listen to my NPR radio on-line without any problems, but if Lisa tries to watch streaming TV shows we reach the data cap after only about an hour. This frustrates her a lot. She doesn't enjoy NPR the way I do; I don't need television, but she does.

She occasionally gets frustrated and talks about canceling our Internet service and getting TV. This always alarms me; Internet access isn't just an entertainment item. I use it to apply for jobs, pay bills, monitor our bank accounts and check the status of refills at the pharmacy. Some of our bills don't even come in the mail anymore, they just send us emails.
Ugh. I'm feeling pretty lousy. It's not just the throat; my head feels weird and sometimes I feel as if I am in a dream. That makes me think that I have a fever, but so far I don't. I think it's just a bad cold.

This too shall pass.