The Bloodstick Decrepitude

Every now and again, seemingly out of nowhere and when you least expect it, an Embuggerance catches you smartly on the side of the head.

Happened to me this morning. You may have...well, facing facts, you probably haven't given enough of a toss to have, but still...you may have noticed that I haven't posted blood results for a few days.

Simply - I ran out of testing strips. Figured there were more in the big bag o' medications in the living room, that I've simply been too busy to look into for the last few days. Looked this morning, to discover they simply weren't there.

Never having been a Boy Scout, I don't subscribe to that whole "Be Prepared" schtick. Or homophobic bigotry. Or pre-teen paramilitarism. Or helping old ladies across roads, come to that. But the point is, I tend not to think far enough ahead, so when faced with a curve ball, I either panic or, in times of early morning crisis, I do what I'm best at - I rummage.

This morning, I didn't have the energy to panic, so rummaging was, I figured, my friend. Found an unopened box of perfectly sealed blood testing strips with their little microchip circuit to tell the machine how to self-calibrate to read them correctly. Stuck in the microchip.

"Ptui!" it said, spitting out an error message.
"Wha-huh?" I asked, not yet being in full control of my consonants.
"Ptui!" it repeated.
"Whhhhhy?" I managed.
"Icky!" it responded.
"Wha-huh?" I asked again.
"Too old!" it spat, seeming to conclude matters.
"Me?" I asked, incredulous.
"Your horrid, icky, wrinkly old testing strips!" it elucidated. "They're all old and wrinkly and smelly and off and horrid. PRUI!"
"Ohhhh," I said, finally understanding - the strips might have been perfectly sealed, but apparently, they'd been in the drawer so long as to be unacceptable to my fussy-eater blood-testing machine.

So - that'll be me schlepping back to the surgery on Tuesday for some fresh, young, sparkly strips then.

Tuesday because we're off to London in the morning - d and Ma and I - for a family weekend, which includes probably dinner at an Italian we used to visit tomorrow night, definitely dinner at our second favourite Chinese restaurant on Saturday night (our top favourite having closed down - boo!) and having belonged to the parents of a friend of ours...man, that was good...sigh...
Where was I? Oh yeah, so the trip includes two meals out AND an apparently kick-ass show: Peter and Alice, starring Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw. Looking forward to that.

And Monday, I have the day off as annual leave, so in all likelihood, I'll bugger off to Cardiff and sit in Starbucks all day...editing.

Hence Tuesday for more bloodsticks, woohoo!

And for now - To the SnoringPit! Hoorah...