Monday, January 3, 2011

98.6

If you would have asked me at 12:30 a.m. this morning what I was going to eighty-six this evening I would have had a different answer than the one I had at 3:32 a.m. The latter time is when my boyfriend, Mark, ran to the bathroom and became violently ill in what I'm still hoping came from food and not a contagious virus. I want to blame the ground beef - as that's what vegetarians do best, blame meat - but a part of me thinks it's a nasty twenty-four-hour stomach flu bug that's surfaced of late. Anyway, when I went to the closet to find a thermometer, I was surprised to find we had two. This surprised me as I think just a couple of months ago I threw away another one. I picked them both up and hit the read button on the first to find out it didn't work; I did the same on the second one and discovered the same result. I looked at them and realized you can't insert a new battery in them. I went digging in the closet and, after much searching, I found the old mercury thermometer and used it. The problem with this thermometer is that it's not so easy to use on someone that has their head hanging in the toilet. So, on my way home from work today I bought a new thermometer - the kind you stick in your ear and it reads in one second. I thought about how easy it is and all of the times I had to sit and wait...and wait...and wait...for the mercury thermometer to read when I was a child. I guess the best thing about it was having my worried mom stand over me for a few minutes until she felt it had finally registered an accurate reading. Then, she would carefully extract it from underneath of my tongue and look at it in the light, turning it back in forth in her hand gently with the same motion you'd use to move a key around in a lock to release the latch, until the mercury inside lined up with a number. At last, the reading would show and usually the result was more rest, saltines, ginger ale, and broth. I suppose kids today don't have that extra few minutes of concerned mommy time. Anyway, I cannot help but digress, but the real point of this entry is throwing away the two thermometers that don't work at all. The mercury one stays as it does work and never seems to break. The ear one is useful for those times you just can't wait. So, while I acquired something new (and useful), I got rid of two old things (useless) in doing so. Another point: cheap thermometers are just that - cheap. I'm sure each of the ones I'm throwing away were about three bucks and the new one was twenty. Maybe the expensive one will last seven times longer. Also, let's hope that I'm able to write coherently tomorrow night and I'm not revisited by the ginger, cashew, and carrot soup I had for lunch. I probably should've put more thought into that before I ate it, considering the circumstances. (And, in case you were wondering, Mark's temperature was and is 98.6.)

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