Pathogens, Precedents, and Retrospect

It's been so long, I'd almost forgotten.

But I got a blast from the past this week - in the form of thermometers, medicines, chills, sweats, aches, dizziness, perpetual drowsiness, and the other characteristics of 'the flu'.

I've been trying to remember the last time I had a fever... it has to be about six or seven years. Oh, I get the opportunity to make acquaintance with the common cold a few times a years, but it really has been a while since I ran a temperature.

They say when you get to know something really well, you usually don't like it quite as well. My bed feels really good when I use it for no more than eight hours at a time, but make that 36 and it feels - really uncomfortable.

Funny how such a small thing like one or two degrees on the thermometer can change so much. The whole family was requested to provide some 'musical support' for a meeting this afternoon... and I would have had the opportunity to spend a bit of time on the three manual Rodgers organ. But better judgement prevailed, and I remained here at home, along with my sister who unfortunately is following my bad example and is now taking her turn with the thermometers and medicines.

So, I'm sitting here, with my fifth mug of hot peppermint tea, with my coat on, and wrapped in a warm fuzzy blanket. This one's older than I am, and as far back as I can remember, 'the blue blanket' has served in so many lines of duty. We used to make tents with it in the living room - over some chairs with a few books to weight it down. We'd roll each other up in it, real tight, so the encapsulated sibling couldn't move. And it's the same blanket I used the last time I was running a temperature, back when I was a just a sprouting 13 year old. And it works well, because right now I'm getting a sweat instead of a chill - temperature is coming down and my eyes are starting to feel a bit brighter.

The thing that irritates me most about downtime like this is that it's so hard to even use the time to think. I was in bed from Wednesday afternoon till Friday morning, (that's a really bad example, Isaac, you gotta realize what a precedent you're setting) and the only thing I accomplished was that somewhere, in the feverish thoughts between waking and sleeping, I realized what was slowing down the secondary hydraulics on the garden tractor. Well, one score.

Actually, maybe I made a little more progress, because I decided what to write about for the next few posts. One of those topics will be 'Offense'. I'm sure everyone has seen this evil in more than one form in their life, and on more than one occasion - people get offended, sometimes over such petty matters that we have no idea where the problem really lies. Sometimes it's simple, sometimes it's complicated, but in every case, no person can be offended without 'taking offense'.

And the other topics - well, maybe I'll just get working on them, instead of 'writing about what I'm going to write about'.