Growing up, my grandmother could always tell when one of us kids was sick.

She would look us in the eyes and proclaim a certain spark was missing, we had sick eyes. And she was always right. Even if we tried to convince her we were better, or it wasn’t that bad, she always knew. Call it a grandmother’s intuition, call it experience, call it both. But, she was always right.

This past Monday, if my grandmother had been here to carefully look me in the eyes, she could have told me that it wasn’t just allergies plaguing me, as I kept trying to convince myself: I had the sick eyes.

I have spent the past two days holed up in my studio apartment sleeping, drinking lots of cranberry juice and water, eating soup, and sleeping some more. OK, a lot more. I’d say I’ve been unconscious 70 percent of the past 48 hours.

Sadly, the internet is still fritzing out at my house, so I haven’t been able to really keep this blog up to date. Which, frankly, is just as well. I was so inundated with exhaustion, cold medicine, and General Ill Brain Fuzziness (totally a technical term, ask your local doctor), that anything I wrote would have come out like this: “asdlkjf SICK ehlkji PASS THE TISSUES laksdfk NEED MORE SOUP.” And really, who wants to read a full blog post of that? So, that explains my absence since Monday.

In any case, I’m back, mostly no worse for the wear, and ready to show you these photos.

My youngest sister went to her junior homecoming dance this past weekend. Rather than do your basic stand over there, take a few snapshots, and off you go photos, we did a slightly more fashion-centric photoshoot.

Let me tell ya’, this gal could be a model.

The red Jeep we had access to was just extra bonus points really!

Thanks for your patience with the lack of posts this week, folks!

Blame the sick eyes.