on Sore Throats and a Solution for Them

So, I've been sick for about three weeks now. It's really quite enraging, as just a month ago, I had just gotten over a cough that had been with me for at least three weeks before then. So, I was healthy for about a week before I made myself sick again stressing over wedding plans. Maybe I wasn't actually better for that week and just pretended to be while my parents were in town for graduation - even so, I wish I could pretend to be healthy a lot more often.

Regardless, a sore throat is always the first and last thing to hit me, illness-wise. It was particularly bad last week when swallowing was just about the most painful thing in the world, but still unfortunately necessary for me to survive. Eating is kind of a pain when you're sick. Throat Coat or Throat Comfort Teas only went so far to relieve the pain, and it was still difficult to swallow that itself. Cough drops didn't work very well either - while they cleared my sinuses at first, it didn't relieve the pain in the back of my throat, and eating too many of them gives me socially unspeakable bowel movements.

After sustaining myself on Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup and ordered-in noodle soups (with no pots large enough to actually cook myself a legit soup), I finally mustered up the strength to go outside and buy some supplies (funny how that coincides with a day that has nice weather). Note, the Hubby-to-Be was also sick for about a week because I inevitably got him sick, so he was miserable with me for a while, and also unable to procure these supplies. (I am a little upset about the fact that I was sick before he was, and I am still not recovered while he is. Sad face.)

The first things I decided to buy was a lemon, cinnamon sticks, and I would've bought honey and ginger, but we have a little pre-made honey-ginger tea thing at home. Ignore the fact that the Honey-Ginger tea mix is supposedly expired... The Korean Honey-Ginger tea is basically like ginger preserved in globs of honey - it has the consistency of jelly or jam, and I keep it in the refrigerator so the expiration date is kind of unnecessary. At the very least, it wasn't moldy, so we're all good. :)

What I used for my Honey Ginger Lemon Cinnamon Tea.

To make my happy throat-potion, as I call it:

• Boil some water in a small saucepan
• Add 1-2 cinnamon sticks
• Stir in some spoonfuls of the ginger-honey.
  If you're using plain honey and ginger, slice the ginger into thin flakes.
• Squeeze lemon juice in (about 1/2 - 1 lemon's worth)
  I also cut a few slices of lemon (pre-squeezed) off to put in to the pot as it boiled (also for eating later, as honeyed lemon slices are delicious)

 All ingredients are added to taste, so I don't have precise measurements. If it's too watery, you can let it boil off some, or if it's too strong, water can be added to tone it down. Boil until it suits your tastes and then ladle into a cup for your drinking pleasure! I also let it sit overnight in the fridge (made more than I could drink in one day) and it's also really good cold, if it's a hot day out, it still feels really soothing, and I feel like it's easier to breathe because of the spices.

EDIT/ADDITION:  So I just made this again, but made it super concentrated (much less water), and mixed the resulting "syrup" with seltzer water and made myself a fizzy, throat-soothing soda!


It's sweet, sour, and spicy all at once, and really soothing for the throat. If you don't like ginger, or don't want it too spicy, regular honey would work instead of the ginger-honey. I definitely need to make this earlier on in my times of sore-throat woes.

on the Toilet Seat...

As a lady, I have heard it said that I should teach my man that the toilet seat should be left down. I say to that:

"NO."

As a person - a practical person - I will always argue that the toilet cover should be closed, should a toilet cover exist, at all times when not in use. This is the most practical, egalitarian state of the toilet.

When the toilet is left uncovered (regardless of the position of the seat), there's always the possibility of something falling into the toilet bowl - something I actually had problems with as a clumsy child. Even if the toilet has been flushed and untouched for the day, knocking your toothbrush off the counter with your elbow into the seat-down, cover-up toilet bowl makes you never want to use the toothbrush again. No one should have to suffer that travesty.

Also, with the cover closed, both male and female occupants will have to lift something up to do their business (and usually, the cover and seat can be lifted in one single motion). Yay, equality!

When finished with one's business at the can, the cover should be closed before flushing because, apparently, spray from a toilet's fush can carry fecal particles up to 6 feet away (and land on things like your toothbrushes). Gross. Close that toilet cover.

In some cases, still, the toilet cover does not exist, or it is not practical to keep it closed. For example, parties where people are generally inebriated to some degree and may or may not be capable of distinguishing between different states of the toilet. I often attend gatherings where I am one of fewer females and most of the dudes are drunk. In this case, if I find the toilet seat left up, I will put it down, do my business, and return it to the state I found it in. I'm a big girl - I can move the toilet-contraption-things too! Wouldn't you much rather worry about just putting the toilet seat down, then having to mop up the miss-aimed piss of an inebriated buddy (or stranger, depending on the party)? Note this person with bad aim might even be female! Because, lets face it, if a girl's too drunk to notice the toilet seat is up, she probably wasn't going to be very neat about her business anyway. (this is something that always surprises me about public female bathrooms - I don't know how some of us miss, but I guess we manage to!) Might as well let her fall in as concequences of her own actions, rather than let her make you clean up after her own irresponsibility!

Any woman who expects that the man should "rightfully" remember to leave the seat down for her is just asking for trouble in a relationship. We are strong enough to lift and lower the toilet seat (and the cover) on our own, and having the cover down is, regardless, the most sensible state of the toilet.

on Obsessions

Egads - a post! Let me explain: So I have a terrible habit of becoming easily obsessed with things. Blogging, however, has not yet become one of them. It is more like an outlet to deal with these sorts of obsessions when I am not actively seeing a therapist.

I stopped blogging before because I went back to New York from my parent's home after summer vacation to continue my schooling (not that I have many regular followers who would notice at this point. Or ever.) I did, however, have some time left to do other things... This was around the time that Mass Effect 3 came out and I really began playing. Well, to be more precise, I watched my boyfriend play it, and I was so intrigued, I started from Mass Effect moved on to Mass Effect 2, and somewhere during that play-through, I caused my boyfriend's X-Box to permanently red-ring. During the time I was playing Mass Effect, I kept thinking about how it would be fun to do a blog post about the series. But playing the game clearly took priority over writing about it. In the downtime between trying desperately to resurrect the old X-Box, buying a new X-Box, and transferring the save files between the old and new using a friend's working X-Box (really long story, quite entertaining in itself), I thought about writing the post, but still - getting through the second game and onto the third in all its glory (bad ending and all) was my top priority and, thus, no blog post was ever fully written. I still have quite a few drafts that I never felt were polished enough for me to publish including a rare fan-girl rant about the wonders of Garrus; I may someday revist, finalize and post them.

However, I now have a new obsession on my hands... WEDDING PLANNING. It has consumed almost every fiber of my being. My then-boyfriend is my now-fiancée and I couldn't be more excited. In fact, I could really stand to be less excited. I haven't been able to sleep for the past few days and every time I close my eyes I envision more and more details of what my perfect wedding would look like. An important note is that my hubby-to-be and I are not planning to have our wedding until at least a year from now - more like 14 months away. (Raise your hand if you think I should continue actively seeing therapy! Don't have your hand raised yet? We'll change that by the end of the post, I'm sure.) I'm quite confident that I made myself sick by not going to sleep until I had finished an inspiration board collage to show to my planning-helpers (I get sick easily which is made worse by lack of sleep...)

"Wow, with such early and visionary planning, you'll have your wedding just the way you want it!" might be your thoughts. Well... No. A lot of what I'm thinking now are small details and have many conflicting elements which I would HATE if I put all of them in one wedding (that whole "less is more" and yada yada yada). Everytime I see something I like on Pinterest (which I just joined for just the purpose of wedding planning and had never used before), I think "That would be great, but how can I mesh it in with my color scheme (which I've decided on years ago and still love) and theme?" And it's hard for me to negotiate between weeding out old ideas to replace with new ones that I might find inspiring, and sticking with what I know and love and have dreamed of for years!

About every 5-10 minutes this weekend, I'd ask my hubby-to-be a wedding related question. "Do we want..." "Should we..." and he pointed out to me, "You know, with this wedding over a year away, if you spend every moment of every day between now and then thinking about the wedding, you're not going to enjoy the wedding very much, you'll just feel stressed and crazy." And I know that, personally, if I spend every moment trying to get every detail just right, I know I'm going to be freaking out on the day-of wondering why every detail is not just right.

Not only that, but I'm just barely learning what wedding planning entails! I've now seen lots of checklists and consulted with my wiser friends who are now veterans of the matrimonial process, but I learn best by doing, and it's quite nerve-wracking for me to think that, no, I can't just plan a "trial wedding" and see how it goes before moving on with the real thing. Well, someone could, maybe, but I certainly don't have the time, funds, or sanity for that.

So the mention of funds and sanity brings me to why I have started to blog about this again. Because I am not actively seeing a therapist (no insurance makes sad-wallet), and I no longer have school (graduated a couple weeks ago from my Master's program), and I'm currently looking for a new job (no money, but lots of time!), I've decided to try blog about my wedding planning process to:

1. give me something to do
2. organize my thoughts & planning
3. give me some sort of thing to look back on in the years to come unless the internet explodes
4. manage my obsessions, maintain my sanity, and help me sleep at night
5. share my creations/creativity

So, about that last point, given that I feel like am a poor mental-health-counselor-eligible-for-licensure-currently-unemployeed-seeking-entry-level-job, I want to be able to make this in a reasonable budget and I know our location is going to eat up a lot of expenses - and I want to give a lot of this wedding a personal touch - so I plan to get started early and do much of the creation myself. I'm not usually much of a DIY person, but I really love crafts, design, and putting my own work into a day that will be one of the most special days in my life is now, well... an obsession. I will update this later with a picture to break up this wall of text.