Meat and Veggie Tales

Here I thought my fancy-schmancy new Paleo-Diet would make me super tiptop healthy. What do I do almost immediately?

I come down with strep throat, because life saw me feeling better and yelled "Aw, hell no!" and did a 1990s Jerry Springer hand motion before slapping me across the face.

So today, I missed a day of work - for which I'm paid hourly - because the doctor warned me that I'm contagious for the first 18-24 hours after I start antibiotics.

I went into the doc-in-a-box in the hopes that the nurse-practitioner would tell me it was just allergies. I even told her that I thought it might be allergies, but that I wanted to make sure since I didn't want to get everyone at work sick, too.

The nurse-practitioner looked at my throat, frowned, asked me about other symptoms (I ran a fever Tuesday, which I chalked up to a burgeoning migraine combined with allergies), swabbed my throat, and then declared me unfit to go to work until Thursday.

Neat.

So I spent the day reading a biography of The Queen Mother, who was, by all accounts, an absolute scream. She was patroness of a secret club devoted exclusively to drinking called The Windsor Wets. One of their requirements as a club was to salute each other whenever possible in public without attracting the notice of non-Wets. A portrait of The Wets hangs in Windsor Castle to this day.

Seriously, do you see the current Queen Elizabeth pulling those shenanigans? Heck no!

Another story tells about a reception she attended during her tour of Australasia with Prince Albert. She had shaken hands with all the attendees when a stray dog wandered into the ballroom and presented itself to her. What does she do, dressed in her diamonds and silks? She leaned over, shook the dog's paw, patted it on its head, and it walked away, contented with having met the Duchess of York.

You don't get much cooler than that. Except for the drinking club. That was cooler.

In a Paleo-Diet update, I'm finally getting all the fruits and veggies I should be eating, and a pretty good variety of them, too. I'm taking my vitamins at night with my dinner, since I have to cook for myself or risk being tempted by the siren song of bread and chocolate milkshakes.

This week, I've eaten an "Oven-Finished Pork Chop" with a slaw of Belgian endive and celery, a steak with broiled asparagus and pear tomatoes, and a taco salad, made with a yummy taco seasoning from Cocina Nueva (sold at Whole Foods) and buffalo meat. Yummy yummy buffalo meat.

So I'm finally getting veggies, I'm supplementing my diet with fish oil (so my post-dose burps taste like fried haddock), a calcium-magnesium blend, Vitamin D, and Vitamin C. I think the high doses of C I'm taking are probably part of the reason I'm not more ill than I am (which isn't very; honestly, I could have worked through the day just fine, if I didn't care about infecting my coworkers), but that could be just my wanting the vitamins to be helping.

I do miss my Dr. Pepper, though. And at the pharmacy today, I had to stand right next to a display of Swedish fish while I picked up my antibiotics, and I have never wanted Swedish fish so badly in my whole life.

Once again, the constant vigilance I apply to my skincare will have to be applied to my eating habits as well.