That's My Bix!

Sometime two days ago, my lips started feeling weird.

They do that sometimes. Typically if I’ve eaten something I’m allergic to, but also if I put something on my face that causes a reaction.

I know I haven’t accidentally eaten something I’m allergic to because I haven’t left the house in two weeks. Which leaves the small tube of Kate Sommerville sunscreen/lotion that I applied two mornings ago as the culprit. It was one of those little tubs that you get as a sample — I’ve been trying to kill all of the bathroom clutter before buying new stuff to replace what I’m out of, which means that I’m venturing into unusual territory. I know I’m allergic to certain sunscreen ingredients, but for some reason I rationalized that Ms. Sommerville would have used barrier ingredients, even though it literally said Broad Spectrum right on it, which is code for “has both barrier and chemical sunscreen ingredients.” Unfortunately, because it was a sample size, the ingredients weren’t listed and I couldn’t be arsed to go into my office and Google it, so gooped away like an idiot.

I spent an entire day applying Blistex to my lips, but then the itching started to spread to my face. I knew I had a hive situation going on, so I popped a Benedryl and went to bed. The next morning, I couldn’t see out of one eye and my entire face was itching, plus it had spread to my torso. My histamines were clearly out of control.

I remembered that our insurance provider offers a video doctor service, so without even brushing my hair, I went to the computer and checked. One of the perks of living in the West Coast is that you can do stuff very early, so by 7 am, I had already gone through the paperwork and was talking to a doctor who spent an entire 3 minutes talking to me and then prescribing various ointments and pills and then signed off. Then I had to wait two hours for the pharmacy to open, which was probably the most annoying. I didn’t want to drink coffee, knowing that I was going to start prednisone as soon as I got my prescription in my itchy little hand, so I was mostly trying to mitigate my own shit monkey brain for two hours.

It turns out that when you’ve been spending the last two months trying to distract yourself from the awful state of All This, you have a tough time trying to find something distracting that you aren’t sick of doing.

Esteban and I headed out to the pharmacy and found it closed, but he wasn’t able to wait until it opened, so we went back, dropped him off at the house, and I went back to the pharmacy, intending to sit by the drive through until it opened. However, I knew I couldn’t take prednisone on an empty stomach, so I broke my quarantine rule and swung through a McDonald’s drive through for a vegetarian Egg McMuffin and a Diet Coke. While coffee and prednisone makes my stomach turn into a sour asshole of an organ, Diet Coke doesn’t seem to fight as much with prednisone. By the time I got through McDonald’s, there was a fairly long line at the pharmacy, so I sat there and sipped my DC, ate part of the McMuffin (which is gross overall but I ate enough so that my stomach wasn’t entirely empty and threw the rest out) and finally got everything. I didn’t want to deal with giving this new pharmacy our insurance stuff unless the cost was egregious. I figured that it would be $10. Wrong, it was $68, but I just paid it because I was too annoyed by everything to deal with putting my phone into the tube, sending it to the pharmacist, having to deal with the fact that they’d have to have my phone code to see the card, wait for them to run the insurance, etc. I consider this my $68 fee for being stupid about putting sunscreen of unknown provenance on my angel baby sensitive skin. I should know better, and yet I keep confirming otherwise.

Once I got home, I started feeling dull and groggy — either a mix of the meds, the fact that I barely slept all night due to the irritation and heat on my skin, or just the lack of my typical morning rocket fuel lattes. I was supposed to have a meeting for Tech Giant Project, and we also had made a plan for my hair stylist to drop off hair goop and Esteban was going to color my hair, but since I had so much skin irritation on my face, my scalp was undoubtedly also going to be sensitive. I begged off both appointments and rescheduled them.

Then, because everything happens at once, on Monday we had put an offer in on a house in Green Bay. The housing market there continues to be insane, with people scooping up houses the instant they drop on the market, and we knew that people had been walking in and out of that house all day on Monday. It wasn’t the perfect house but it ticked many boxes and was certainly a place we could be happy for now. I wrote a letter to the owners telling them how much we loved the house and why we were picking it.

The offer came back on Tuesday saying “we really want to sell you this house but there are other bids, can you come up significantly?” Our realtor said that it never happens like that, where the other team actually tells you exactly what you need to bid or even reaches out to someone who was too low when they had other better offers, so the letter was certainly the delta. Ultimately, we had offered slightly more than asking price already, and the asking price was well above property value, so we agreed that it was pushing too far out of our comfort zone in terms of what made sense as an investment. So in the midst of my antihistamine haze we let it go.

It feels a little conflicting — and I think much of that is because it’s an exit strategy within our grasp. So much of this ennui has been based in uncertainty. People keep asking what our plans are, when are we moving, when can they fly out to help, etc, and we know that they are doing so because of they care about us, but it’s stressful to come up with an answer. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know. It’s one of the least satisfying mantras there is.

I ordered moving boxes and supplies — apparently they have free shipping if you spend more than $50. The need to actually go to Uhaul and pick up boxes was one of the biggest things that was stressing me out, so I was relieved that I could just pick everything online and they’d take care of it all. Once I get my dissertation fully submitted through the various academic regulatory processes (you’d think it would be easy after the committee said you’re a doctor, but guess what, it’s a constant parade of formatting and form submissions after that), when I’m not working on this project for Tech Giant Blog, I’m going to focus on packing. We learned from the last move that we’re not the best without the military precision of Ward and June, so I’m going to attack this next step with a new mantra instead of “I don’t know”.

Now it will be “What Would June Do?”