Laffy Taffy

Jared made the mistake of letting me go to the grocery store alone a week or two after Halloween. Grocery stores after any holiday are awesome places to be. Why? Discounted candy, of course. Jared had actually gone to the store a few days prior because I asked him to check out the leftover halloween candy and get me some if it was on sale. When he got home later that night, I asked him if he'd stopped at the store. He said that he had and there was a lot of Halloween candy left.

But he didn't get any.

"I didn't think it was a good idea" he told me.

Strike one.

So instead he bought himself some disgusting pumpkin eggnog.

Strike two.

And nothing else. Even though he KNOWS that he's only allowed to get such disgustingness if it accompanies some chocolate milk. For me.

Strike three.

He got the silent treatment that night. And the next morning. And when I had the chance to visit the grocery store a few days later, I bought me some chocolate milk. And four or five bags of clearance Halloween candy. I was grinning from ear to ear when I showed Jared what I'd done. He was less than impressed. I didn't care.

My primary class and I have thoroughly enjoyed my purchase over the last few weeks. Except for the Laffy Taffy. I made the mistake of bringing all the red and green ones to my class the week before Christmas. Not only did I have to listen to four nine and ten-year-olds chew on theirs, but I had to listen to lame joke after lame joke after lame joke. I decided right then and there that primary was not the time or place for chewy candy with jokes on it. So now Jared and I are working on the rest of the bag. I ate one yesterday morning and couldn't help but read the joke...

Q: What's a parasite?

A: Something you see in Paris.

Dear little Alfred C. from Des Moines, I must respectfully disagree. Unless, of course, Paris resembles what an emergency room at a Utah hospital might look like on Christmas Eve night. I've never been to Paris, so I don't know. I've seen pictures though, and I took first-year french three times in school, so I'm somewhat familiar...

Let's jump back to Halloween, give or take a week. We ran out of water so we had to pump water from the creek and leave a hose running into our cistern for about two days to fill it. Then Jared treated the water and after letting the treatment do its thing for about 24 hours, we had drinking water again.

Here's a pic of the pump house by the creek I took earlier this year when Jared was fixing the pump. The second picture is the hose thingy that actually gets the water. And the grey thing at the bottom of the third picture is the access door to our cistern. 

I thought the black tubing stuff was what gets the water from the cistern to our house, but Jared tells me it doesn't really have a function. The line pumping water to the house is underground. As you can tell, I don't really know much about the whole process. That's Jared's job. And he usually does a good job with it all.

Until this last refill.

Shortly after we refilled the cistern, my stomach started bothering me...to put it mildly. I thought it was my body's way of adjusting to the change in birth control I was using, so I didn't think too much of it. After three or four weeks, though, I was getting quite frustrated and wondered if something else might be the culprit. I started reading about gluten intolerance and the symptoms sounded very similar, so I started cutting back on bread and anything with flour in it. That definitely helped, but it was a miserable way to live. Bread, brownies, and cookies hold a very special place in my heart, and I didn't want to give them up! Sure you can buy and make gluten free goodies, but it's just not the same. And it requires so much more effort and planning! So I was kind of depressed for awhile. But then I realized that I was losing weight so maybe the diet change wasn't so bad after all :)

I accepted my fate and planned to stock up on all of the gluten free types of flour when we went to Utah for Christmas. Long story not so short, I didn't have to stock up on anything. Except bottled water. The day after we got to Utah my stomach got worse. And worse. And when Christmas Eve night rolled around, I was in the worst pain I've ever been in.

After spending some quality time in the fetal position in bed with tears streaming down my face, I finally agreed to let Jared take me to an instacare. We drove down to Bountiful only to find that the instacare was closed. The pain and nausea caught up to me at that point and well....let's just say that Jared and I were both very grateful that I'd thought to bring a garbage can along with us. Jared called my parents to find out what our other options were. My mom was worried that it might be my appendix so she directed Jared to the nearest hospital.

After a couple hours of tests, poking, and prodding in the emergency room, the doctor told me that my appendix was fine but that something was wrong with my colon so it wasn't processing food like it should. They gave me fluids to treat the dehydration and wrote me out a few prescriptions for waterborne parasites. He also told me I needed to go see a specialist as soon as I could. One of the prescriptions was for giardia, and the other was for something I can't remember. When I looked it up online, it said it was used to treat anthrax, among other things. Nice.

I'm pleased to report that after a week of drugs, the pain and about 90% of the discomfort is gone. And even better, I was able to make some bread this week and eat a whole bunch of it. And even more better, my ordeal has earned me a new nickname with Jared's brothers. No more "Big Haul" or "Annabanana" for me. Oh, no.

You may now refer to me as...

The Fever.

Short for beaver fever. Which is a phrase I'd never heard of.  Until now.

Oh, how lucky am I.