I am reading, or trying to read!, the full dendritic cell study (see my October 6th post) and also recovering from some sort of minor “bug,” that held me captive for about 24 hours this week. No big deal, I am fully recovered now…in fact, I went back to work today and feel 100% fine…but I am being cautious. I found out just this morning, you see, that one of my students, who has been absent from work for two weeks with the flu (nobody knew if it was the H1N1 virus), has now come down with bronchial pneumonia, poor sweetie. As a consequence, antibacterial hand sanitizer pumps have been put in all the company bathrooms…something that has never been done before. Wise move, I say!
This is a photo that I took last night of Peekaboo
, our youngest kitty, playing inside a paper shopping bag on my parents’ bed. You will notice that the bag’s handles have been cut. There is a good reason for that.
Once, as a kitten, our male cat, Piccolo, got his head stuck inside the handle of a plastic shopping bag…and he (understandably!) completely freaked out. He began flying up and down the stairs with the bag dragging after him (he could easily have choked!), with both of us scampering madly after him, trying to set him free, which Stefano managed to do in the end. Luckily, apart from his getting a huge fright (he peed all over the stairs, poor dear) AND giving Stefano and me the fright of our lives, no real harm was done. But we learned a valuable lesson: if you let your pet play with a bag, always make sure that the handles are cut. And never, under any circumstances, leave a bag of any sort lying around the house.
Well, I am going to stick my head inside that dendritic cell study again…I must have been a huge masochist in a previous life…yes indeedie!
P.S. My blog banner photo was taken by Stefano at the Oasi di Focognano, a WWF oasis located right outside Florence, where we went last weekend to photograph migrating birds. In addition to dozens of great and small white egrets and grey herons (like the one in the banner), we saw a stork, too. Fabulous!
Cute kitty Margaret.
But I mainly want to comment about the “bugs” and infections that we MM’ers are prone to. Especially you, since you come in contact with so many students.
“Nasal irrigation” does wonders in avoiding and clearing up bacterial infections in the sinus area. (Not viral ones, though). You can either buy a “Neti pot”, like my wife uses, or, as I prefer, buy an 8 ounce plastic bottle (commercially available for that purpose) and fill it with an isotonic, sterile, salt solution (two level teaspoons of salt in a liter of water).
While some do not like the idea of squirting water up one nostril and out the other, I (strangely) rather enjoy it. If more people would use it, our reliance on antibiotics (and antibiotic laden soaps, etc.) would be greatly reduced. Not good for the pharmaceutical industry, I guess.