I cannot remember a time when I did not suffer from seasonal allergies. My mother tells a story of when I was little and told my father that having allergies was awful, and he surprised me by saying he didn't have any; I'm told it made both of them rather sad as they realized I'd never know a year without allergic reactions. Every year about this time my allergies start up, and I get downright despotic about the opening of doors and windows in my house.

I am getting older, for time now flies by and months fall off the calendar. I dare not think of what milestones await me around the next corner, but suffice it to say I'd love to find the pause button: I need to catch my breath. The last four months both crawled and flew by, proving that my perception of time is as firm as it has always been, which is to say, tenuous at best. Thanksgiving, Christmas, the New Year, Valentine's Day, and St. Patrick's Day have all come and gone, and not all of them left pleasant memories.

In short, I've been feeling quite sickly all this time. A good portion of it has to do with the upheaval commensurate with a new job. I've gone on at length on my other blog about change, but to sum up, change brings with it a tremendous amount of stress. There is but one other time in my life that I have been as stressed, and that was the year I served as the Interim Pastor. Stress of this magnitude and this duration always makes me sick to my stomach all the time. As you can now well imagine the holiday feasts were no joy to me, but a chore in not embarrassing myself by publicly displaying what was previously in my stomach. To those poor souls who supped with me, this is why I was nowhere near cheerful.

Ever since a week after the international students arrived, I have been sick with stomach problems. I had spent too many nights hovered over the toilet, ejecting my dinner. I was starting to get worried why I was all of a sudden very ill for many weaks and not able to keep food down. But my symptoms were odd, I was sick off and on, with no apparent reasoning behind my apparent food poisoning until today! One of the international students (who is a self-proclaimed expert on everything) was washing the dishes while I was in the kitchen and I caught him putting dishes away that he did NOT rinse off with water.