Lilac Colored Glasses

This week has already been long, and it’s only Tuesday evening. I’ve found that to avoid feeling like the creepy Sanex commercial on the metro I have to make it to Brussels Central before 7:30 am. This morning I woke to a note from CB telling me my usual tram route was under construction, so last minute I ammended my route to work by leaving 15 minutes earlier (6 am), biking to the city center, catching a different tram and therefore catching an earlier train. I got to work at 7:30 but I don’t start until 8:00 so I wandered around the area, hoping against hope that I’d find a coffee place that was open, but that was too much to ask from Belgium. Stupid Americans thinking coffee is a drink to help perk you up in the morning…real morning doesn’t start until 9 am in Belgium. Everything before that is just late at night.

But anyway, moving on.

Between waking up at the butt crack of dawn the past few days, working 8.5 hour shifts in a relatively rigorous environment and a 3 hour total commute which involves me walking or biking about a mile and sometimes sprinting to catch a train, I’m pretty drained. And on top of that I’ve developed an annoying scratchy itch in my throat and some stuffed sinuses. I knew I’d lost my resistance to kid germs but I was hoping my white blood cells would hold out longer than week. Weak ass leukocytes.

So this evening I came hobbling out of the bedroom after the new episode of Komen Eten and mumbled to CB that I was going to take a shower.
He smiled and said, “So this is how I can tell Korie is tired?”

“What do you mean?” I croaked through my scratchy throat.

“When you sound like you’ve been smoking for twenty years, that must mean you’re tired.”

“No,” I corrected, “that just means I’ve managed to catch the hacking cough going around the daycare already. These,” and I pointed to my glazed, bloodshot eyes (really, I look like I have pink eye, they’re that bad), ” and these,” I pointed to the dark brown circles beginning to creep in a widening radius from my lower lids.

“These are how you can tell a tired Korie.”