Be vewwy vewwy qwiet. I'm hunting endorphins.

Hour eight of headache. Die, headache, die. Lovely evening consisting mostly of staring at computer, trying very hard to move nothing more than my fingers and my eyes. A still head is a head that hurts less.The battle was lost in hour five, when thirty minutes after taking the first aspirin + acetaminophen + caffeine combo, I was whispering to friends, "When can I take another? I think the first one skipped town before doing anything useful..."

Plans were laid today to restart a small project of summer knitting that has been left by the wayside for quite some time. I have moral objections to knitting sweaters in summertime. I now own one of those fascinating little clicky objects known to knitters as row counters. Such is my penance for selecting a complicated pattern that takes over twenty rows to repeat.

"But I needed a challenge," I say. The standard Southern ending for that sentence is "like I needed a hole in my head."

This has potential, now that I think about it. If the pain doesn't work, there's always trepanning. Die, headache, die. There's only room for one of us in my head, and I'm staying.

The current plan is to sit quietly at this computer, composing semi-coherent emails, moving as little as possible, until round two of the medication kicks in. Luckily, my reaction to aspirin is quite predictable. The dosage necessary to evict one of my rare headaches is very close to the amount needed to knock me into a very deep sleep (images of me slumping over at my computer are left as an exercise for the reader's imagination).

So I will just sit here very, very quietly. No coding. Even the sight of an open parenthesis would probably make me cry right now. I'd read over the knitting pattern I want to resume work on, but fear I'm better left to verbiage on the level of "See Spot Run." I'm afraid that by the time I decipher all the YO's and SSK's my head would finally just explode and get it over with.

I think it likely that my normal sense of humor will return shortly after my scalp desensitizes to the point that I can stand to brush my hair without whimpering. Aren't we supposed to get some kind of runner's high from pain or something? If so, where's mine and why is it hiding from me? If the cats have stolen it, I will be forced to severely hurt them.

Ooooh. Just got early warning indicator of incoming sleep missile. Time to duck and cover.

Die, headache, die.

Addendum, next morning: Ah, I can think properly again. Amazing how much easier it is to complete a single thought when your brain no longer feels like it's having holes bored into it in multiple places...