St(range) Patrick's Day

During the spring and summer (and sometimes fall), North Salt Lake has food trucks on Monday nights. Since I like to support local businesses, I sometimes enjoy going over to the food trucks.

They have resumed for the year, so I decided to grab dinner from them on Monday. I got reuben sandwiches for me and my parents, since I like to eat corned beef at this time of year,

I feel a little weird making this picture the first one, because it will show upon Facebook, and I think some of my blog "readers" don't actually read and will think I made it. And also, I worry that people will judge me for not being vegetarian, even though I probably eat less meat than the average person.

and I also got a green-colored key lime cheesecake, because I like to eat anything green during March. (Well, as long as there's an accompanying green flavor, like mint, lime, pistachio, etc.)

I often wake up in the wee hours of the morning and remain awake for a couple of hours. So between Monday and Tuesday, I awoke at 5 a.m. feeling a bit nauseated, then I fell asleep again later.

Then, at 7:45, shortly before my alarm went off, I woke up feeling even worse. I ran into the bathroom and began forcefully vomiting the remains of my sandwich. There were little bits of corned beef and little seeds that were probably from the bread, but the most common element was the purple sauerkraut, which I kept blowing out of my nose. I hadn't thrown up since Thanksgiving 2015.

So what do I do now? It didn't seem like I should go into work, but I thought I would work from home. But first, I wanted to go back to bed, since I slept poorly.

Well, it turned out that all I wanted to do all day was sleep. I was too tired to work at all, and I ended up throwing up two other times, one of which was mostly water. I probably slept more than I have slept during any other illness. All I had was water and some Gatorade. My parents believe the cheesecake poisoned me, since they ate the same sandwiches but not the cheesecake, but I think there are too many variables to know what caused it.

On Wednesday, I felt much better, and though my appetite was smaller, I could actually eat. But I still didn't feel 100 percent, so I opted to work from home.

Thursday was St. Patrick's Day, so I wore my shamrock tie, green glasses, green pants, orange belt, and shamrock socks. I was ready to return to my office computer—but my office computer wasn't ready for me. I unlocked my computer as usual, but it was being unusually slow when all I was doing was looking on File Explorer to open my documents for the day. So I restarted my computer. But the restart was taking an irrationally long time. So finally I just turned the button off. When I turned the computer on again, it was totally broken. I tried a few troubleshooting options, but they didn't work. I was going to reset it, but I didn't know if the IT folks would approve of that, so I called them. They made a ticket for me, and then I waited for them to call. I couldn't do any work on my computer, so I did some low-priority reading while I waited. And waited. They finally got back to me when there wasn't much time left in the day, and they did tell me to reset it. I could have done that myself. Oh well.

I went home and had our meal of corned beef and cabbage. I didn't know that was a thing until I was an adult, and I only made it part of my celebrations beginning in 2015. I do like it better than merely adding green food coloring to rice or potatoes.

Also pictured is a (dried out) piece of Trader Joe's Irish soda bread. I didn't have the time or appetite to make my own this year.

But that evening I couldn't do much fun, because I had to "attend" a Zoom meeting for church instructors. Oh well, I don't know that my St. Patrick's Day would have been that interesting anyway. And since February 15, I have been eating green food and watching Irish-ish shows, so it's not like I missed out on any one-day-only festivities.

I'm feeling much better, though I didn't feel up to running yesterday, especially since I'm still working on my portfolio. I had to take three days off the portfolio this week: one because the food trucks took longer than expected, one because I was sick, and one because of the holiday and teacher meeting. I'm still working on it, but I can see the end now!