Tuesday Reminiscences: In which I remember throwing up

I've been throwing up... a lot... um... recently, so I thought I'd tell a throw up story.

Lillian was 4 months old. My husband and my friend Stephanie's husband were in the same program at Cal Poly, and I think they were working on their senior projects, or their theses, or something to do with airplanes that was taking up a lot of their time, so we decided to take a day trip down to Santa Barbara and leave the men folk to their eigenvectors.

As you travel south from San Luis Obispo, about an hour away, 30 minutes north of Santa Barbara, is Solvang. I'm not really sure why this place exists, but it's a Danish tourist trap. All the houses have Danish architecture, they have statues of Hans Christian Andersen strewn about, you can buy Danish pastries at every turn... you get the idea. I had been there when I was young and if I was more dedicated to this post, I would have found the picture of me with my siblings behind this wood thing and put it up for comparison. But, I'm lazy. Also, I didn't know Lillian was chewing on the wood at the time. I was just trying to get her head over a body while holding her out sideways from me, which was very tiring.

We decided to stop there for lunch.

I had a chicken sandwich with sun-dried tomatoes, and it was delicious. As I was eating, I realized I couldn't see my food very well as there were bright flashes across my vision. And, anyone who gets migraines with aura knows what's coming. I took two Excedrin and tried to lay down on a cold stone bench in front of a bookstore. Stephanie took Lillian for a walk around while I prayed that the Excedrin would kick in before the headache.

No. Such. Luck.

After laying down for approximately 10 minutes, I felt a rumbling in my tummy. I sat up and quickly figured out that I couldn't make it to the bathroom in the bookstore as I didn't know where it was in the store, or even if they had one. I turned around, and threw up my chicken sandwich with sun-dried tomatoes (and probably the Excedrin) into the bush behind the bench. I felt really bad doing it because it was a shallow planter at about shoulder level if you're sitting, so there was no hiding what I had just done.

Stephanie came back and I said that we had to leave and that she had to drive us back to SLO. She was really nervous about this because 1. She had never driven our car and didn't like driving anyway and 2. We had to get gas for the return trip and she's from Oregon, the land where you don't pump your own gas, so I don't think she'd ever done it before.

We got back just fine but I couldn't eat sun-dried tomatoes again for at least a year.