Now Sick

Yay I am sick. My throat is full of baseball-sized glands. I am lightheaded and sometimes feverish. Tomorrow, I work. Then, I go for dinner with Juggler and Chris. Then, I sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep...

Yargh.

Really sick. Throat like a sack of lacerated rocks. I can get through morning work, I think. This may have been a poor time to plan a 14-hour day.

We'll see how it goes.

Home for Lunch...

...because I skipped half of work today and, despite the extra two hours of travel time to get it, have decided I need lots of hot tea. There is something seriously wrong with the glands sort of shoulders + up. Did you know there are a couple of dozen glands in your tongue that can swell up to nearly the size of peas? That there are weird ones at the name of your neck that, when they swell up, will hurt if you turn your head? That if your throat is sufficiently swollen you can easily swallow through the mucus but breathing takes some thought?

These happy frun facts have been brought to you by Greenie's Lunch Hour. To anyone who mothers me, even by lj (fishgoddess!) thank you so much. I will obey, cause... I like being mothered, actually. And besides, who says no to ginger tea? I only need time to make some.

I -am- still going to try to make the apple fest, but am not 100% on that. Ditto the Chris-Juggler meeting.

Zodiac

Oh, yeah, and I'm rereading Neal Stephenson's Zodiac for the third time, and I'm noticing that it's very well written as a detective book too. That is, all the clues, even comon-knowledge clues, are presented in the text beforehand. You could theoretically figure it all out on your own. It remains engrossing, of course. There's a great scene at the beginning of chapter 20 that I need to quote for you at some point.

(no subject)

When I got back home there was the usual post-trip crap to take care of. MAil and messages. Had to get a birthday present for Auntie. Had to sign a bunch of papers to continue Tanya's "studies" at GEE. They shut off our phone service so we had to sit down and thrash out about three months' worth of unpaid phone bills. In the middle of s spirited discussion of who had made seven consecutive calls to Santa Cruz at three in the morning, Ike got up and announced that he was moving out. He was tired of the plumbing problems, he said, and the weird messages on the answering machine, and Roscommon had come down while he was at work and torn down the Mel King campaign poster on our front balcony. That was okay. Ike was a shitty gardener anyway and he complained when I ran my model trains after bedtime. Tess and Laurie, the lesbian carpenters, announced that they liked the kitchen better after we'd untrashed it and cleaned it up so why not try to keep it that way? I pointed out that I had bought three new badminton birdies before I left for Buffalo and now they were all gone. Should we call this place a "co-op" or a "commune"? How about calling it a "house"? Who had scrubbed the Teflon off the big frying pan? Since Tess had weeded the garden, how many tomatoes did she get? Whose hair predominated in the shower drain--the women's, since they had more, or the men's, since they were losing more? Was it okay to pour bacon grease down the drains if you ran the hot water at the same time? Could bottles with metal rings on the necks be put in the recycling box? Should we buy a cord of firewood? Maple or pine? Did we agree that the people next door were abusing their children? Physically or just psychologically? Was boric acid roach powder a bioaccumulative toxin? Where was the bicycle-tire pump, and was it okay to take it on an overnight trip? Whose turn was it to scrub the green crap out from between the tiles in the bathroom?

Well, that's the Zodiac quote from the beginning of chapter 20. I absolutely love the sense of interaction it conveys. It's so real-feeling... how many discussions have you had that looked like that?

Now, most of the book is not like this, of course, but I do so love that particular part.