Crapologies

Yes indeed, folks, I really must apologize for the lack of new posting both here and at The Sleaze. Much of this lack of activity is due to my toothache, part of it also down to British Telecom and their woefully inadequate customer service. The latter meant that an engineer didn't come out to me until Saturday, twelve days after they were meant to transfer the number over from my cable operator. Twelve days without a bloody phone! Anyway, this meant that - as they won't give specific appointment times, I had to get up at 8am on a Saturday (whilst still exhausted from my toothache and the side effects of the antibiotics I was taking) and try and stay awake until he called. To cut a long story short, he arrive just after nine and had it all sorted in just over an hour. Like an idiot, I didn't go back to bed, but stayed up, resulting in me falling asleep during the afternoon, before eventually going to bed early - having been too knackered to either work on another story for the main site, or post here.

As I mentioned before, the antibiotics I was taking for my infected tooth were also taking their toll. Now, I don't usually suffer side effects from such things. This time, however, I suffered an upset stomach for twenty four hours. I was finally back 'on solids' by Saturday evening. I also have a bad habit of making myself paranoid by reading those bloody leaflets they issue with drugs these days - the one's which list all the possible side effects and the symptoms you should be looking out for. With this particular medication, I was warned by the leaflet to seek immediate medical attention if i noticed my urine darkening. Of course, after twenty four hours of taking the antibiotics, I convinced myself that my urine was now darker than it had been the day before. A tense period of me checking the colour of successive batches of urine followed, ending only when I determined that it had now lightened and was back to normal. It was whilst carrying out this last comparison that I was struck by one of those revelatory moments. It suddenly occur ed to me that to anyone entering the house at that time, I'd seem like one of those sad individuals you see in TV documentaries - peeing into plastic bottles and holding them up to the light to see what colour my piss was.

Of course, the whole bloody thing was ridiculous. What do they mean by darkened when it comes to urine? Compared to what? Is there a colour chart? Like just about every person on this planet, my urine varies considerably in colour according to what I've been drinking. Some beers turn it dark, whereas drinking lots of water tends to send it virtually transparent. Indeed, according to a friend of mine, drinking too much cider turns your urine orange. Mind you, that's probably just her. She's weird. She goes around telling people what colour her urine is without prior provocation. Getting back to the point, they really should be a bit more specific about such things in those leaflets. It would save the likes of me wasting time examining their own piss rather than writing new stories...