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Greetings on this Tuesday morning! Turns out, even with the good cough syrup, I'm still awake at night. Freaking steroids. Oh well, it's okay, at least I got a little more sleep than the night before.

Yesterday at work, it was bugfuck insane. The one offices PET machine has been down for 4 days, and will be down again today. Patients were understandably upset, since this is part of their cancer diagnosis, but goddamn, stop taking it out on us. We did not have the machine break AT you. Also, you are not special, we'll get you back in as soon as we can, but I'm not bumping someone else for you.

Add to that, call volumes were incredibly high. At one point, we had 37 calls waiting. It was absolutely the busiest I've ever seen it. I took 52 calls, and that was with making some outbound calls. I was waiting for it to slow down to make them, but I finally had to just do them because it wasn't slowing down. When I left, there were 25 calls waiting. If I hadn't had a doctor's appointment at 4:45, I would have offered to stay and get a little OT.

Instead, I hopped off and right onto a virtual doctor's appointment. The nurse practitioner I saw was very sweet. She kicked down the codeine cough syrup, and told me if it goes past day 17, I. should let her know and she'll order a chest xray. I can live with that. The cough syrup was very important to me. It means actual relief. I didn't cough much last night between that an our vaporizer, which was good. Like I said, the steroids are still making it difficult to sleep straight through, but when I am sleeping, it's pretty good sleep.

After I finished with the nurse practitioner, I threw on some hamburgers and Twice baked potatoes, which turned out very well. We're still using the good grass fed beef that we got from the farm, so it's especially tasty and not too fatty. It's expensive, but I highly recommend Evensong Farm's Beef shares. You get to choose your cut package. The beef is grass fed and delicious. I've done it for two years, and I plan to do it again in the spring and pick it up at the Silver Spring Farmer's market. If any of my DC peeps want to get some, I'm happy to put in the order when it comes time.

Then, I went to get my prescription, and came home to walk the dog. Then, right after, I took the cough medicine and went to relax. We listened to another episode of Bake On, which is a podcast about the Great British Bake Off, and I fell asleep halfway through.

Today, I'm still coughing, but maybe a tinge better? The voice is annoying--it's kind of raspy and deep, and I'm going to have a fun time talking all day. I sound like a sex bot, so that'll be fun.

We're down to 114 days til Alaska. Every time the clock ticks another 5 points, I get excited. It's below 115, which is something. By the end of the month we'll be in double digits. I want to start getting our dog used to the sitter, but I need to wait until this crud is done. I don't believe that I'm still contagious, but the cough *sounds* abysmal.

The sitter is the last piece of the puzzle. I'm sure Yoda will be okay with her, though I'm sure he's going to be a pain about eating while we're gone. Boodle probably will be sad, but she'll be okay. Hopefully, Yoda bonds with her, so that he will spend the day pushed up against her like he does us. Thanks to the way he loves his groomer, I'm cautiously optimistic.

It's slowly dawning on me that I'm going on a cruise. I know I booked it, and have scheduled excursions and done research, but it's actually going to happen. I'm terrified that something will go wrong, but mostly I'm just excited about it. I'm actually going to see the Pacific Ocean and Seattle and Vancouver, and some of the Alaskan ports. We talked about this cruise years ago, but couldn't do it because of Dad. But it's all paid off. I paid everything up front except the one hotel and one of the car services.

I've decided in our Vancouver day we're going to get passes to the hop on hop off bus, so we can get to all the major tourist attractions with no problems. It might mean missing out on a few local gems, but that's okay, there's no way we could see everything in one day. My two things are Granville Island and Gastown. I'd like to see Stanley Park, but we'll see what we have time and energy for. Oh, and I want to do the Flyover ride. Totally a tourist trap, but the version in Disney was one of my favorite experiences. It looks like they have two possible experiences, one a flyover of Canada, and one of Iceland. Ideally, I'd do both if there's time.

Okay, time for me to consider the merits of pants. Everyone have an awesome Tuesday!