Well, ugh!!
I am sick now. Ugh.
The kids kept complaining of a sore throat and I was sympathetic but now that I have the same sore throat I am shocked at how painful it is! Not all the time, but some of the time, especially when I wake up in the morning. Which reminds me, I need to take some ibuprofin.
Ok, I am back.
I also have completely lost my voice. But my breathing is good, so praise God!
I paid big bucks to get a COVID and 2 types of flu test from Amazon. I tested myself and they were all negative. So I guess this is some random annoying virus. And annoying is the word!
Strep throat occurred to me but strep is usually localized and doesn't have a cough with it. So I don't think so.
Sarah is sick today as well. I thought she already had this but apparently not. I lost track.
Anyway. Enough whining.
So I have been reading a lot lately, even more than usual, and I always read a lot. It is my favorite hobby.
I wonder if any published writers who are moderately successful are not big readers. It seems like reading and writing would go hand in hand.
This last fortnight I read a couple of books by a man named Joe Tasker. He was a mountaineer who climbed many difficult mountains before dying on Everest at the age of 34 in 1982. Obviously a long time ago. He turned in his last book to his publisher right before heading for Everest, where he died.
I love reading mountain climbing books for some odd reason. I also like reading about polar exploration, especially Antarctica.
Why? I guess it is because explorers and mountain climbers are weird people and I like reading about weird people. I like to think about how different they are, and how their brains work.
Also, there is nothing to make me feel more calm about an illness then to be curled up on my couch, sipping tea, warm, with plenty of oxygen, while reading about people miserably climbing tall mountains.
Anyway. Joe Tasker was always going to die on the mountains. He was not a careful person who had any sense of self preservation. There were two times in his books where he ALMOST died. Came within a hairsbreath of dying, and yet he wrote that he always thought maybe he was being a coward and always felt this internal desire to push himself farther.
He was high up when he died, along with his friend Pete Boardman, who also died, and no one knows exactly what happened, but neither man seemed to have much self preservation.
Another mountaineer who writes well, who has lived to a decent age, is Ed Veisturs, now age 65, who has climbed all the mountains over 8000 meters. He was the first American to do so. He also writes autobiographically, and his perspective was very different from Joe Tasker's. Namely, Veisturs said over and over that getting to the top wasn't the most important thing, getting down was. He was always willing to give up a climb if he thought the conditions were too dangerous. Now he would be the first to say that ANYTHING can happen on a climb, but he was very conservative, unlike Joe Tasker, who was downright reckless at times.
I find both men interesting. Tasker died young doing what he loved, but it is still sad that he had this inward drive to go upward beyond what his body could handle. Veisturs is even weirder in a way, because he took on a very dangerous career (after becoming a veterinarian as a young man) and yet approached it with care.
Yep, interesting.
As I breathe in the thick oxygen of near sea level and drink lemonade.
Very interesting.
And I would never, ever, ever want to climb a big mountain.
