Holiday Traditions: Insomnia and Illness

Yes, it's the most magical time of the year once again, and as ever I choose to celebrate by not sleeping and getting a cold.  My colds always start with a nice piercing agony that shoots through my tonsils for about 36 hours then morphs into a mucous surplus that lasts about a week.  Some people bust out the eggnog, others sing carols (I think this still happens in retirement villages, anyway), and I lie sleepless, twitching convulsively and annoying poor B, who has to sleep with me until I give up and go curl up on the couch in the basement.

The added bonus to these traditions is that this year I managed to give myself some kind of weird, low-grade seasonal affective thing by spending too much time working in my (cold, dark) basement on the latest textbook editing gig.  Now that my in-laws are here to visit through Xmas, and the editing is done, I will spend less time down here and more time in the relatively warm-and-bright upstairs.

I just recalculated budgets for 2013 and...damn.  Try running a family of 3 on a starting CC instructor's salary.  You will probably find it kind of daunting.  Thankfully, I've been scraping together a little extra work (again: textbooks) and I'm signed up to teach in the summer, which is just bonus money on top of the annual salary.  Either way, the whole "we need to buy a new car thing" is still out there, and it looks like we'll be just barely breaking even every month with the added cost of car payments.  C'est la usual shit, I suppose.

Anyway, everyone have a nice Mayan end of the world tomorrow.