Smoke gets in your eyes, and in your hair...

...and of course it gets in your lungs. Smoke inhalation. What fun.

Okay, so my friends have this New Year's Eve party, which I have been going to since 1999, and was going on for several years before I started going. At this party just after midnight, there are fireworks. Fireworks in this particular area are illegal, except for a few public shows that are usually on the 4th of July. I am not sure which fireworks get you into trouble, so I would prefer that we didn't use any at all, but I am in the minority, and the tradition continues. At some point in the past, there was an accidental fire. Not a very big fire, and it was very quickly put out, but ever since then it has been part of the tradition to purposely set fire to the grass, and then have the owner of the house come out with a hose and put it out.

Usually nothing exciting happens, but one time there was this accident that everyone else claims never happened. So I would have thought that would have been the end of that part of the tradition, but the next year there were again fireworks and parts of the grass set on fire, etc.... The only year that there were no fireworks or fire there was a drought, and we got all sorts of glow in the dark toys to play with instead rather than risk having something serious happen.

So this year we had just had snow and rain and then more snow and rain, so the ground wasn't dry. Then, just to be on the safe side, the owner of the house went out with the hose and made sure the ground really got soaked. That grass just was not going to burn.

Determined to have their fire, some of the guests brought a box of shredded paper from work. So we did have a fire, and quite a bit of it for a while, but the grass next to it did not burn. So there was a fire, and there were fireworks, and there were women jumping over the burning shredded paper, and there were men jumping over the fireworks.

And there was a lot of smoke. At some point you couldn't see very well, and these men jumping over the fireworks just ran into each other.

It seemed to me that the house was more crowded than usual. There were my friends, and people I don't know who are related to the owner of the house, and more people I don't know who are friends of the family. And a somewhat confused cat, who didn't know why there were all of these people in his house.

In theory we watch movies at this party, but I didn't. There were either movies that I had no interest in or movies that I saw two weeks ago at the last movie thing. And there was a lot of eating, though I didn't think that I had eaten so many desserts that I would make myself sick.

Then there was this really disappointing discussion, which I won't get into right now, but I really must get a new set of friends. At this point I don't think that anyone in this little group shares my beliefs about much of anything.

And it was way past my bedtime, and I was wondering why I felt so bad, and why I was still at the party when I felt so bad. So I got my things and left, and someone made sure I got to my car okay. And I got the car warmed up and such, and then I remembered why I felt so bad. The night before I'd felt a little sick and ended up getting up a couple hours earlier than usual, which is already two or three hours earlier than I would like. So by the time I got home I had been awake about twenty-four hours, and I had been up trying to do stuff for most of that time.

My husband usually gets home before I do, but not this year.

And then I woke up a few hours later, and the room was spinning. The room continued to spin for most of the day. I hadn't felt that bad the year before, and thinking I would feel about the same I had made plans to go shopping, but that didn't happen. I spent the whole day in bed, mostly watching Stargate.

Yesterday I did make myself get up, and felt somewhat better. We went shopping, though the sales we mostly over and I wasn't that interested in the shopping anyway. But I had to get up and do something.

I get confused. I think today is Sunday, though I spent much of yesterday thinking that it was either Sunday or Monday.

I still don't feel great, but soon I must make an effort to get back to the usual stuff.