Liver

I didn't think it was possible but I am pretty sure my liver hurts. It's more of a general throbbing in my upper right quadrant. This is a result from the two week bender I have been on since the lovely Kaitlin Thiel arrived in the country. Something about Kaitlin really kicks me into full gear and I begin to run on pure adrenaline while she's around. Normally I go to sleep around 9pm so I am well rested to lead some aggressive phonics circles and dramatic storytime sessions but when she was here we managed to go out to the pub almost every night, come in around two, and then I would teach the next day or be up touring the country. This resulted in both of us running a course of illnesses, recovering, then relapsing repeatedly over our time spent together. It also resulted in us becoming more ridiculous as the weeks progressed and subsequently humiliating ourselves on numerous occasions.
Kaitlin arrived two weeks ago, and stayed with me while I had one more week of teaching before half-term. After that week was up, we journeyed to Scotland as I was off from school that week also.
As much fun as this all sounds, the time we did manage to sleep, Kaitlin forgot to remind me that she has night terrors. Oh ha ha, you say? Nay nay. These aren't mumbling-in-your-sleep-I'm-uncomfortable type night terrors, these are full out Freddy Krueger mixed with a dash of late-night marathons of Criminal Minds and a side of the Exorcist. Nearly every night, I was awoken by the sound of not soothing breathing noises, but full-out screams of terror, hair pulling, and flailing sheets/curtains. If I was really lucky, I could get Kaitlin just drunk enough that her REM sleep was altered and therefore fewer screams could be heard in a night, but that was also rare. Last night I had to convince a half-lucid Kaitlin that she wasn't actually fighting off a mutant child, trying to steal her luggage from the airport...I was unsuccessful.

Here are some of the most unreal moments of our travels:
- Me convincing Kaitlin that our talks before falling asleep weren't actually referred to as "pillow talk" (this was an actual verbal battle ending in Kaitlin saying a classic "interestinnnnnnggggg..."
- Kaitlin being unable to remember the name of the traditional Scottish dish Haggis, and each time saying something more ridiculous like "Are we going to try Hamsy today?" Some of the more interesting ones being Habbish, Homish, and Haggish...close but no win.
- On several occasions Kaitlin and I would implement extremely poor planning. One such example which set the tone for the entire trip was when we hurried for McDonalds breakfast and when we arrived, decided to "quickly" check our route to London before we ordered. When we stepped up to the counter, they said breakfast had just ended at 10:30, my eyes panned across to the wall clock to see it flashing 10:33. If only we hadn't looked into our route for 10 minutes before ordering, we would have been chowing down some serious hash browns, instead of Snack Wraps...ugh. This was the story of us missing seeing Edinburgh Castle. We stumbled across a street performer on our last evening in Edinburgh and decided to stay to watch a bit of his show. He fascinated us with his charm and dazzle, but kept us there by publicly humiliating/scrutinizing anyone who tried to leave his show. After he was done and we gave him all our spare change to prevent ridicule, we ambled up to the castle and when we reached the gates, were stopped by security as they had closed five minutes before we got there. Don't worry my pictures of the outside are probably just as great...not.
- When Kaitlin arrived, she had to purchase a travel card and one of the requirements is a "passport style" photo for her rail card. We found a booth for her to get the picture done, and I convinced her that she couldn't smile or have any bangs in her face so she would have to clip them back. Funny enough, the only clip I had on me was a mammoth one so the resulting photo was somewhat frightening. Once the pictures popped out of the machine, Kaitlin found out she didn't actually have to make a DUI picture worse than Nick Nolte's. See below:

 Her response was that of outrage and actually said, "If I die today, this will be the last photo taken of me and then won't YOU feel bad." To which I laughed more hysterically and said I would blow her photo up for the wake and have it what everyone would have to say good bye to. We started speaking again hours minutes later.

Overall it was an unreal trip and I miss having my bed buddy to jar me out of peaceful sleeps. Now I am back to the daily grind of wiping tears and building puzzles, but I think I will live on.