personal

The longest day

Today is supposedly the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, but I can say as I noticed. It was mostly an unexciting day, despite its being my first back at work since last Thursday. I’m feeling a whole lot better, though I can’t quite shake this cough.

Today’s Forgotten English is “puthering,” meaning “pouring with rain,” but it was bright and sunny all day long, so it’s not exactly appropriate. Last Friday’s calendar page, however, offered “inexpressibles” as “a euphemism for trousers,” and I think I’m going to try using that more often in conversation. I think more perfectly innocent words like trousers should have euphemisms that make them sound naughty.

I am a little sad that tomorrow will have just a smidgen less daylight in it, but them’s the breaks.

Happy Father’s Day

I was woken up first thing this morning by my father, asking me to help him push one of the cars into the street because the battery had died. And, well, today is Father’s Day, so who am I to say no? It was incredibly hot and muggy outside, though, even before nine o’clock (which is what constitutes “first thing” on a weekend), so after we jump-started the car and poked at one of the taillights (which wasn’t working yesterday and might be the source of the problem), I came back inside and tried to go back to sleep for a while.

I mostly failed at that, but I did spend the better part of the day indoors, within the protective bubble of air conditioning. I watched this week’s Doctor Who Confidential and largely completed the Sunday crossword. (I liked this week’s a lot more than last’s.) I spent a little time out in the backyard, taking some photographs and some video, and reading a few stories submitted to Kaleidotrope, but the humidity got the best of me after not too long. And it’s maybe good that it did, because not half an hour later it poured rain for fifteen or twenty minutes.

I’m still getting over this cold — and now thoroughly convinced it is a cold, and not just allergies. It’s mostly just a nagging cough now, which, with any luck, will be gone before long. I’m feeling a lot better, so that’s good.

After dinner, my mother and I gave my father some Father’s Day gifts (mostly gift cards). My sister will be visiting next weekend, but she called to wish him a happy day. My father, unfortunately, had to attend a wake for an old family friend this afternoon, so we didn’t go out to eat or anything special.

Mostly, it was just a quiet Sunday.

June 19

More of the same today, mostly, with the most exciting thing being the new episode of Doctor Who that I watched. (And I thought Russell T. Davies threw everything and the kitchen sink into his last season finale.) I’m not 100%, still with the cough, but I am feeling a whole lot better today.

Sick day

I stayed home sick today, which was about as much fun and as exciting as you might expect. Not really the three-day weekend I’ve always dreamed of, I spent most of the day asleep or lying around. There were the Jehovah’s Witnesses and guy offering to give an estimate on driveway resurfacing that I turned away, and the episodes of television I watched, and the plate I accidentally broke, but when you mostly just want to spend the day asleep, there isn’t a whole lot to talk about.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t just allergies anymore, though.

Under the weather

Still not feeling so great, and there were times throughout the day when I wondered if I’d made a mistake going in to work at all. I’m still not entirely sure if this is a cold or just a severe allergy attack I’m nursing; none of the symptoms that are supposed to differentiate the two are definitive in my case; and in fact, I think I’d feel better if I was running a fever because at least then I’d know it was probably a cold, and therefore likely to end sooner rather than later. I’m leaning towards cold, if only for that wishful thinking — who knows when allergies would start to lessen, given the changing weather we’ve been having — and because I’m pretty sure I felt this coming on as far back as Monday or Tuesday. Then again, I’ve heard that yesterday, when I definitely knew I had something, was a particularly bad day for allergies… Maybe if I got myself a hookworm infection to get rid of allergies, I’d know for sure…

Yeah, I’m going to lean towards cold for the time being. All I do know is, I have a runny nose, watery eyes, and a persistent cough, and none of it’s very much fun. I’m not horribly sick or anything — I still have an appetite, mostly, and I did go to work — but I’m ready to feel not sick at all, thank you very much.

Is it any wonder that the rest of my day seems so uneventful?

The reading I went to on Tuesday night got a little bad press, causing a very minor kerfuffle online among genre (and specifically Neil Gaiman) fans. My feeling is, the article in question was very poorly reasoned, riddled with cliche and few factual errors, and not really representative of what I saw there at Columbia. Maybe it’s just that I’m naturally attracted to geeky women, but I don’t remember a crowd of only “balding Goths, girls with jutting chins and faux punks.” I do remember wishing, offhandedly, that the evening hadn’t been framed as “Neil Gaiman Returns to Columbia University,” since it was primarily a discussion of the new Stories book and focused equally on the other panel members. I do think some people came thinking it was going to be all Gaiman and nothing but and adopted maybe too worshipful an attitude towards him. But that was a minor not-even-quibble in what was a really excellent night.

This night has been quite as excellent, but at least tomorrow’s Friday.