Today's post is in two parts -- one for the update on my health, and the other is an update on our construction.
WorkMy last update was on Friday, which was a particularly good day for me. I managed to work the entire day, without taking a nap in the middle of the day. On Friday, I decided that Monday would be a great day to try to go back to work.
Not so much. There are orders of magnitude of difference between getting out of bed and working from a laptop at the kitchen table to getting downtown to the office to work. Here's what the commute was like yesterday: Susan drove me the three blocks to the train station, where I had to stand and wait about 10 minutes for the train (that was 8 minutes late). The train jiggled me around for about 45 minutes on the ride downtown. Then I walked outside to pay to much for a cab to take me the 0.9 miles to my office. The elevator took me from the first to the ninth floor -- that actually went pretty smoothly. Then I realized that the new glass door on our office was a lot heavier than it ever was before, and had to wait for a co-worker to open the door.
After that, it's no wonder that my side was hurting pretty bad. Our COO made several comments that he couldn't look at me because I was in so much pain. Between my pain and realizing that being at work in pain was distracting my coworkers from getting anything done either, I ended up catching a cab back to Union Station to be on the 12:35 train home. After a little nap, I dialed in for one more meeting in the afternoon, but was pretty spent.
So I worked from home today, and had an amazingly productive day. I felt like I started to catch up on some of what I got behind on last week. It was great! But after dinner the pains returned. It is on my left side, right below the rib cage. It hurts to be in bed, so I'm up late writing a blog post...
Tomorrow, I'll call again to see if the doctor will give me some pain medicine. If I don't get an answer, I'll make an appointment. I need to be able to sleep.
The WallI normally do all home improvements myself. While sometimes challenging, I enjoy tackling something I've never done before and figuring out how to solve construction issues. But, since buying this house, we've had too much work to do. So, when it came time to remodel the upstairs, we decided to make an exception to the rule and hire help for the insulation and drywall. We even hired the drywall guy to come in early to remove all the old paneling for the insulation contractor. This demolition was done a week before I went into the hospital.
Unfortunately, the paneling on the outside wall was just attached to furring strips that were attached to the brick, so there was no room to put insulation. The weekend I was in the hospital, I was planning on framing out a wall that could hold the insulation. Obviously that didn't happen.
But, it's getting kind of chilly in Chicago, and not having any paneling or insulation in that room upstairs is having an effect on the comfort level in the Jones household, so we had to figure something out. Last week, Susan asks me "how would you build the wall?" So I explained it to her, and she says "that doesn't sound hard, can I do it?" Remember, she is five months pregnant, and asking if she can build a wall!!!
She did it!
Her dad came over, and
while I sat in a chair directing, the two of them got the wall up, and neither had ever built a wall before. There are a lot of things I admire about Susan. Her "Can Do" attitude is high on that list. I am very grateful that my children have such a strong woman for a mother!