Thawing

I just thought the cold had hit with a vengeance on Friday, but that was just a little coughing compared to what hit later that day and intensified all weekend. We're talking full-on NyQuil commercial misery. By Sunday morning, if the "bring out your dead" cart had come by my house, I'd have been tempted to run outside and throw myself on it -- if I could have made myself get off the sofa. It should have made me feel better that the weather took a turn for the moderately warm and sunny, but there's just something wrong about a nice, sunny day when you're sick. The rest of the world should be suffering with me, darn it! I did briefly emerge from the cave Saturday afternoon to take out my trash, and I must have looked awful because I ran into a neighbor, and she not only kept her distance from me, but she came back later and scraped the remaining ice off my front porch, probably so I wouldn't slip and kill myself on my way out to the bring out your dead cart and clutter up the neighborhood.

I'm on the mend now and feeling much better. I'd thought about doing some errands today while the roads are dry and non-icy and before the next winter storm hits Wednesday, but I'm still not 100 percent, so I think I'll take it easy one more day and then take care of everything tomorrow.

I had planned a grand marathon of all the paranormal romantic comedy movies I own, but I reached a point where I didn't even feel like watching movies. USA obliged me on Saturday with an NCIS marathon, which makes for good sick day viewing when you can't focus on anything. I did feel extra empathy in the episode where Tony gets the plague. While he's hacking and coughing on the screen, I'm hacking and coughing on my sofa and saying, "Oh honey, you and me both." I thought that the book of short stories I got at the library would be good for a short attention span, but you have to actually focus on short stories. You can't zone out for two pages and still know what's going on. I ended up reading one of my own books because I could zone out for pages and still know what was going on, and I figured that might be the one way I could read one of my books and not keep trying to mentally edit it. It was almost like reading something someone else wrote.

I hear there was a big football game on Sunday. I was marathoning Downton Abbey on PBS, doing a cultural U-turn from watching Beverly Hills Cop 2 on one of the HBO channels in the early afternoon. I love Judge Reinhold's character in that one, where he's this mild-mannered guy who turns out to have developed something of an inner Rambo. "You can never have too much firepower" never fails to crack me up. I pretty much watch the entire movie just for that moment.

I'm trying to get back to a normal work schedule, and fortunately most of the work I need to do today involves reading, so I can huddle under a blanket and read and call it work. I love my job. Also, I'm supposed to do an Enchanted, Inc. question this week, and I don't recall having one on tap to answer. If you've got a question about the series, let me know. If you've asked one I haven't answered, ask again because my brain is Swiss cheese at the moment.