This year, as apposed to previous years, I have been trying to write fairly early in the day. There was a time when writing at the end of the day was just routine. But that is something that is far easier to accomplish when one is deployed (see 1998, 2003-04, 2005, 2010-2011 –  months within those dates) and there are limited demands on time other than those which are work related. Come to think of it, I should probably add in the mind numbing time (2009-2010) in the UK where, if I hadn’t made some excellent friends, I might have spent my entire off duty time holed up with knitting. – Oh, wait a minute, that is largely what I did!

Anyway – I was in no shape to write this morning. In fact, I am not even sure that I recognized when morning occurred. Remember me mentioning the second Costco run – the one where I picked up a Fast-Trak for Dani? Did I also mention that they had cherries? Normally I only buy cherries in the spring when they are fresh. But Costco had 1 kg containers on sale. They appeared to be the same as all the other cherries I had purchased last spring.

So I bought them.

And ate them yesterday evening. After all, no one in this house expects me to share cherries. They know better. Nothing about them was strange, nothing tasted off. But those self-same cherries revisited me multiple times starting at 0 dark whenever. Since there was absolutely nothing else that I ate, I am blaming the cherries.

I think the last time I felt that awful was ~ 1995 after a trip to Taszar (Hungary) during IFOR. That particular episode was accompanied by fever and chills. (T*40C) and turned out to be a major salmonella outbreak. It was also the last time I ever ate scrambled eggs in a deployed environment.  And since then I have been meticulous about food and drink. Other members of my family have gotten food borne illness since then, but not me. Not norovirus, not anything, not me.

So why was I lucky enough to get sandbagged in my own house? To the tune of ill enough that I actually thought about going into SFVA for hydration?

No clue, but by not sharing my cherries, at least no one else became ill.