The silliness that the flu can inspire:

More of this goofiness available at Flickr.

It’s official: I have the flu. I tested positive for Influenza A, although apparently for the seasonal type rather than the H1N1 piggy flu type, which I suppose is a small mercy. However, it’s still the damn flu.

My fever spiked to 101.9 before I went to bed last night, though it finally broke sometime in the middle of the night. I woke up at about 2am and felt a lot better, but realized my sheets were completely drenched in sweat. That was just awesome.

The worst of the fever seems gone – I’ve been hovering between 99 and 100 all day today – but the coughing, exhaustion, and loss of appetite are still on full-force.

I will say, the flu is a very effective (though not at all recommended) way to balance out the fact that I ate like a pig in Chicago. Between basically having to force-feed myself even the 1200-1400 calories a day I can get down and spending a lot of extra energy on such illness-related tasks as sweating profusely, I’m already back down to what I weighed before I left.

I would have preferred the traditional exercise method, but I certainly can’t deny the efficacy of the flu.

The doctor wrote me a scrip for Tamiflu, which she thinks will be effective in preventing this from turning into anything worse, as well as possibly knocking a couple days off the end of the illness.

She also gave me among the more amusing doctor’s instructions I’ve gotten in a while, which were “Sleep a lot, drink a lot of fluids, and watch a lot of T.V.” Waaaaay ahead of you there, doc.

I went to Chicago this past weekend for the annual Reuniafest festivities – My third straight year and one I was only able to make because I got an absolute steal on airfare. I’d been debating whether throwing financial caution to the wind was a good idea, but I am so, so damn glad I went.

The game was awesome (the biggest comeback EVER for Northwestern), the party was fun and Henkel outdid himself as usual, and by staying an extra day I got a chance to actually see people (i.e., the ghettoalums who were considerate enough to drag themselves to the Map Room) and do things other than eat and drink.

Granted, I definitely ate and drank my way through Chicago. Thin crust pizza two night’s in a row (Pat’s Pizza: Surprisingly good), a new Chicago Style deep-dish place (Pequod’s) and of course my last-minute trip to Flattop.

I’ll have an official verdict tomorrow (I usually wait a couple days before doing an official post-trip weigh-in just so my head doesn’t explode), but I think I managed to gain five pounds in four days. THAT is a vacation.

The main downside is that I have caught some sort of rather nasty virus during the travel process. It started out just feeling shitty, tired, and without appetite last night when I got home, evolved into heinous coughing fits this morning, and seems to be on its way to a spiking fever this evening.

I had said to a couple people before I left that I would be extremely surprised if I didn’t come back from this trip with some sort of nastiness at bare minimum, and specifically with the swine flu.

I’ve got an appointment with my doctor tomorrow to see if they think I need antivirals (any kind of bad cough or flu can have super-nasty complications in asthmatics), so we’ll see if it’s the piggy flu or just some other general virus.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out. Despite my current viral travails, this was a really, really great trip and just what I needed to recharge going into the GREs, my first full online course in web programming, and trying to get my application done.

Woo, Chicago!

If you would, I encourage you to buy it from this dude, because his commercial is fucking awesome.

via Gawker.

After a nice long bike ride (that boat is still there, by the way, just covered in graffiti), I came home and decided to watch a DVD of Oz that I have out from Netflix.

There’s a little CGI fly that flies in and out of the frame on the episode selection menu. Chaplin hopped up next to the TV, and hilarity ensued:

He’d been doing this for a couple of minutes already before I managed to think, “I should record this,” so I apologize for my complete inability to stop laughing at him.

But man, that was funny.

I have found that the quickest way to get me to do something I’ve wanted to do but have been putting off for a while is to give me something else that I absolutely have to do, but I really don’t want to do.

Example: I’ve been meaning to organize, reduce, and clean up my financial records for some time. I had a giant pile on my living room chair that piled up for over a year of old bills and other things I needed to keep, I had a filing cabinet full of stuff I mostly no longer needed, and I had a couple binders full of stuff that could be pruned significantly.

I have been unemployed for seven months, yet just in the last few days have I actually managed to make real progress in going through all this stuff. I shredded an entire trash bag worth of shit between last night and this morning (well, this afternoon, since last night I broke my old shredder and had to get a new one this morning).

And why am I finally making progress? Because I have to study for the GREs. Yes, because I have something else that I really, really don’t want to do (ie. relearn a whole shitload of math), this thing that I’ve been meaning to do but is kind of a pain in the ass suddenly becomes a much more attractive option.

I may not be getting done what needs to get done sooner, but I’m getting SOMETHING done, dammit.

But when it does, Conan O’Brien shows a pretty close approximation of what happens next:

Hat tip: LAist.

I saw it in the distance. And I thought,”What the fuck is that sitting on the sand? It looks like a boat. It…is a boat…”:

Okay, so it’s a boat just sitting in the middle of the sand on the middle of a very busy beach. I have a few questions.

1. How exactly did this boat get there? It hasn’t been stormy enough for the damn thing to just wash up, especially not that far up the beach and particularly not relatively upright and totally intact.

2. Why is it just sitting there? If it’s for a TV show or a movie or something, which is about the only rational explanation I could think of besides it just washing up, why is there nobody guarding it?

3. If it actually did wash up, why the hell did they put a fence around it instead of removing it?

So bizarre. I’m hoping I can do some more riding this coming week – though I seem to have re-aggravated a pectoral muscle that’s been giving me trouble for a couple weeks by hauling my heavy-ass backpack around for 31 miles, so I may have to figure out an alternate way to carry all my water and Gatorade and granola bars before I go out again.

But we’ll see if the boat is still there in a few days or a couple of weeks. Anybody else got ideas of why the hell a boat would randomly wind up sitting on the beach a couple hundred feet in from the high tide mark?

I’ve been really tired all week, but somehow I’m still managing to stay up until 2 or 3am.

Chaplin seems to be biologically programmed to wake up at about 8am and knock shit over until I drag myself out of bed, so things are not going to be fun until I can convince my body that really, midnight is a perfectly reasonable time to go to sleep.

I haven’t had hard-core insomnia in a while, so I’d forgotten a few things about it. Things get much much quieter in my neighborhood, since the dull roar of the freeway fades to almost nothing.

Sounds I normally wouldn’t notice, like the ticking of the clock over my TV or the ringing in my ears from years of thinking I was going to be a rock star, become overwhelming.

The biggest problem with insomnia when unemployed is that it’s very difficult to motivate myself to get back on a normal schedule, because really, what do I really need to get up for?

Other than, you know, my sanity?

The LA Dodgers are playing the St. Louis Cardinals in the baseball playoffs right now, and as per usual, the mayor of St. Louis and the mayor of LA are making the traditional Stupid Food bets.

There are two twists to this one: First, the bets are, of course, occurring on Twitter – Villaraigosa‘s items are spread out over several tweets and a linked photo, and the mayor of St. Louis’ items are so abbreviated as to be almost entirely incomprehensible (the LA Times somehow translates his list as: Toasted ravioli, a build-a-bear, and a Twitter t-shirt).

You might have noticed, however, that Villaraigosa eagerly threw in one more thing: The L.A. Times.

Yes, that’s right, my many journalistic and formerly journalistic friends, one of the largest newspapers in the country is now being placed (albeit half-jokingly) on the same level as toasted ravioli and a gigantic burrito.