Day of rest

Sunday - 10^th June

I could use some fresh zumo full of vitamins. Their blender is powered by a bicycle. 

The day started out nice, with warm sun and French toast. Alex saw our neighbour Scott on the blue catamaran first thing and invited him to join us on an excursion to Sintra, which he accepted. So that’s our next port of call.

Alex needed to do more work on the mast and I wanted to catch up on writing. But my cold was now complicated by a serious sinus infection. Pardon my detail, but I had all the symptoms: watery eyes, thick yellow mucus in sinuses, headache, post nasal drip, lung congestion, hacking cough, and intermittent fever. I have felt pretty awful since I got here. Alex had the cold first, but his seems to be resolving. Mine just gets worse. I don't want to see a doctor, and I don't want to use antibiotics. Standard treatment is a course of antibiotics to see if it's bacterial, otherwise it's either viral or fungal. I will use Sudafed, garlic, honey with lemon, hot tea, hot compresses, and ibuprofen with a little kefir as a chaser. The occasional hit of albuterol inhaler helps with breathing during the night. Unless it gets much worse, I'll let nature take its course. 

I started by unpacking the medical bag to see if I had any useful remedies aboard. I had stuck my hand in last night looking for cold meds and discovered that something had leaked and goo covered everything inside the dry bag. Yuck. It was impossibly sticky. Luckily, I had packed almost everything in zip lock bags and I had a good supply of spares. So I spent most of the morning re-packing everything, cleaning what I could – fortunately nail polish remover did remove the goo with some effort. At least I got to review what’s in it. Lots of stuff was out of date, but those in the pharmaceutical know, understand that out of date does not mean doesn’t work, only that the interval reported is how long stability was tested. There are also a few things missing which I’ll have to remedy. Not a job I wanted for this morning, but one that was necessary nonetheless. It was a spray on wound sealer that had leaked. The bag is wrecked. Too bad, as it's a nice waterproof dry bag. 

Then I got to writing. The internet is still down, but I managed to get one post up – no photos. Got my mobile to work as a hot spot. No photo upload or big files. Can’t download Anne’s Flying Fish files. But I managed to get one type-only blog up and continued by writing the rest in Word. So here it is, and here I am at the end of the day. Caught up and it feels good. At least I won’t lose the memories. Is that why I write my blogs? I do believe so. How about you?