07 November 2006

Fever

Woke up to the strains of little mouse feet at about 4:00 am. I thought I had that hole plugged. *sighs* I didn't really get back to sleep after that. If I'd realized I had a fever, some Advil might have taken care of that. When my alarm finally went off and I figured out I had a fever, I did take some Advil. I felt much better as soon as it kicked in. Better still after helping with the taiji class this afternoon. I managed to avoid doing any real work whilst teaching my classes. Math025 I've just been reviewing briefly at the beginning of class and then giving the students problems to work in, solo or group. Math257, I talked through some tiling/tesselation vocabulary and theorems, demonstrated some of them on the ELMO, then let them try to make Escher patterns.

Since I'm finally hungry again, I figure that this cold or whatever it is that's giving me the fever is on its way out. I wasn't hungry most of yesterday. Correction: Every kind of food I thought of sounded horrible yesterday. Today I've been semi-starved as a result. Oh, and I may have figured out why green tea started making me nauseous a while back. Goes back to the whole metallothionein thing, but via a very circuitous route. Short version: some of the minerals in green tea may interfere with zinc absorption (tied to metallothionein). The ones I've seen a connection for are gallium and fluoride. So I've probably been low in zinc for quite a while, and the excess copper from the copper tea kettle made it worse. However, I think my copper levels have normalized now, and I'm back on my multivitamin, so maybe when my zinc levels get back to normal, I'll be able to enjoy green tea again. At the moment, I can only drink it if it's very VERY weak, and even then not a full cup.

Oh, and don't suggest pure zinc supplements. I can't handle straight zinc. I found that out long before I'd even HEARD of gluten intolerance or metallothionein.

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