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Sunday

I spent the weekend in Maryland, visiting my sister for her birthday. We spent the day in Frederick, including a visit to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. (That’s not it up above, but a rather a nearby church.) We had a nice dinner out and a nice weekend overall. The weather, which promises to grow nasty again over the next couple of days, cooperated quite nicely.

I came back via train, which stopped briefly in Secaucus, and that’s as close as I came today to paying much of any attention to the Super Bowl. I can’t say I benefited much by watching the second episode of Sherlock‘s third season instead — this is easily the show’s weakest series so far — but at least I’m not watching over-hyped commercials all night.

It was a pretty decent weekend.

Tuesday

Today marked the first time since Thursday that I went outside, wore anything but pajamas, or did anything more strenuous than watch several episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show*. After four long days of illness and convalescence, of stomach bug and fever, I finally went back to work.

Sunday was pretty miserable, though, and it’s what convinced me I needed the extra day off. I’d planned to go to the doctor yesterday, but by that morning the fever was gone — and moreover, it seemed to stay gone without any outside assistance. I was still pretty beat, and so I lay about all day, but I was feeling a lot better long before the end of it. A lot better than the day before, definitely, when I’d had to take a long break between eating the two halves of a fairly small banana.

So I went back to work today. It was pretty uneventful, except for the yearly emergency preparedness training the building makes all of the floor’s fire safety team go to. And even that’s just sitting around learning about what to do in case of a biological attack, or gas leak, or zombie outbreak. I’ve still got lots of imminent deadlines and projects that I wish were more finished than they are, but it was nice to not come back to more of them.

And it was nice to get a chance to read again, something I couldn’t really do while I was sick. On Friday I couldn’t even concentrate on television. (Though later, putting Galaxy Quest and then Goonies on in the background while I tried to sleep was actually quite a comfort. Good movies, those.) Tonight, I finished reading Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. It’s a simple but powerful book, a reminder of Butler’s talents, and though it’s a novel written about the antebellum South and slavery from the viewpoint of 1976, it doesn’t feel the slightest bit dated. I liked it a lot.

February promises to not be entirely normal, just looking at my schedule coming up, but it was nice to get back to a little bit of normal, today, anyway.

* Seriously, why have I never really watched this show before? It’s a little dated in places, but it holds up remarkably well. It’s endearing and funny.

Sick daze

So I don’t know about you, but I had a kind of a terrible week.

There was that whole kerfuffle on Tuesday, when I missed the Broadway show I had been planning to see, but after that, I thought everything was going to go back to normal.

And then on Friday I got sick.

I woke up that morning a few hours before I normally do, and that’s when the vomiting began. I’ll spare you any more of the graphic details. It’s enough to say that I spent a long and uncomfortable day at home, lying in bed, occasionally turning to Twitter or my work e-mail when I could, trying to sleep when I couldn’t. Later that night my fever spiked at close to 103, but at least by then I was able to hold down enough water to swallow some Tylenol, which seemed to make a big difference.

I’m much better today. The fever’s not gone completely, but it’s in the much more manageable double digits, and I’m actually managing to hold down solid food. (This being toast and rice pudding, all-day-meal of champions.) I even finally took a shower, brushed my teeth, and put my glasses back on. And I’m writing this. Whatever I had isn’t completely gone, but it seems to have done most of its damage in a real hurry.

I’m not doing anything much more adventurous today than eating rice pudding. I’m still lying in bed — new clean sheets, though — and watching episodes of Scandal and Supernatural (both ridiculous in their own charming ways).

The one silver lining in all this — beyond the fact that I am feeling better — is that the team outing I missed on Friday, the lunch and museum visit with my colleagues I missed in favor of retching and sleeping, has been postponed. I was looking forward to that, and I’d have been sorry to have missed it. I’m glad they were able to reschedule it. I would have made lousy company yesterday.

Monday

It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so I was off from work. I still had to wake up a little early to go with my father to get his car inspected, but I was able to go back to sleep when we came back home.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I watched a bunch of episodes from the last season of 30 Rock, then the first episode in the new third season of Sherlock. (I think I’d maybe have a half-letter-grade kinder to the episode that this review, but it’s pretty much spot on.)

Then this evening I read the first volume of Walter Simonson’s run on The Mighty Thor from the early ’80s. It’s a lot of fun, with many weird and unexpected ideas and a great dash of humor. It’s little surprise that a lot of the recent Thor movies are drawn so heavily from Simonson’s work on the title. (Though I wonder if we’ll ever see Beta Ray Bill on the big screen.)

And that, somehow, was a full day. I also put some bird seed and suet in the feeder, went to a local burger joint for lunch, and read some submissions for Kaleidotrope. And I haven’t once looked at my work e-mail since Friday. It wasn’t an exciting weekend, but sometimes that’s for the best.

Friday

It was a long week, thanks in part to the conference that took up my Monday (and the nearly full work day I put in over the weekend to try and make up for that). It was a good week, though, and while the next couple of months still promise to be incredibly busy, I squared away the most immediate and time-sensitive of my deadlines and managed to do some real work.

I also met this morning with the young woman I’ll be mentoring, as part of my job objectives for 2014, who I only got to chat with very briefly at the office holiday party. I’m hoping I can give her some insight into the development process, assuming I have any insights to give, and I think once we’ve settled on a project she can take the lead on that’ll be easier.

I was supposed to go this evening to a “write-in” — basically, the kind of free-writing group I got to every Sunday, only this one with more people, and with a small price tag. My friend Maurice suggested it, but when train troubles prevented him from getting into Manhattan himself, I took it as a sign to take my tired body home and watch episodes of Babylon 5. (I also watched the last How I Met Your Mother episode, but that was really underwhelming.) I haven’t done a lot of writing in 2014 yet, though I’m going to turn my attention back to it this weekend.

I was so happy not to be taking my computer home with me this evening, I can’t even tell you. We’re only two weeks into January, but I’m so glad this is a long weekend. I’m looking forward to not evening thinking about work until Tuesday.