I’m sorry I got on a plane (aka Germ Transportation Module) at 7am and flew across the country while you were battling some throat/sinus crud.

I’m sorry I enjoyed some booze and generally had a life on vacation while the throat/sinus crud got worse.

I’m sorry I somehow managed to get pinkeye on top of the throat/sinus crud.

I’m sorry I then got back on another plane, again at 7am, again transcontinentally, this time with throat/sinus crud and pinkeye.

But seriously, I’ve been home doing nothing but sleeping and using the cat as a heating pad for two and a half days.

Can we please do something to actually get the throat/sinus crud and pinkeye out? I know you must be just as tired of them as I am. Please let me know ASAP.

Love,
Me.

I’ve gotten into something of a winter funk. It started out with the aforementioned really awesome stomach bug that left my innards out of sorts and me curled up in pain for a week, and continued into a solid week of pouring rain in LA.

Rain in L.A. somehow seems much more depressing and draining than rain anywhere else, probably because it’s always sunny here and the change of pace is so much more severe.

So between the illness and the rain, I’ve been tempted many times these last few weeks to just curl up on my couch and sleep the day away. Some days, I manage to fight the urge and actually get up and get a load or two of laundry done.

But more often than not the last couple of weeks, Chaplin will jump up on me, and either curl up between my feet or on my chest. The power of a sleeping cat is utterly ridiculous when it comes to draining me of any ability to stay awake. He’s like a purring hot water bottle.

I can sleep 10 hours a night and if I don’t snap myself out of it, I’ll still nap another two hours with the kitty. Which is exactly what happened last night and this afternoon.

I’ve mostly only been getting out to go to the gym recently, and I think I need to make sure I keep changing things up a bit more in order to prevent myself from literally sleeping my life away.

The first thing I need to do is get back to dragging myself to the gym in the morning rather than the afternoon – I always have way more energy after the gym, and am consequently way better at fighting off cat-induced sleepiness.

I also think I need to increase the time I spend away from my apartment, even though it may increase the danger of me spending money. That’s been my primary unemployment excuse for never leaving the house: Staying in is almost always cheaper than doing anything other than bike riding outside.

I’m at the point where I’m so averse to spending money that I can’t really bring myself to go to the local coffeehouse or sandwich shop and gank their wifi just for a change of scenery, because I’ll be tempted to at least order a hideously overpriced beverage if not a sandwich that costs more than I have budgeted for my entire day’s worth of meals.

So I think it’s time for me to hit up my friendly local parks and maybe go sit and get my reading-learning done out by the ocean when it’s a smidge less windy than it has been. Maybe I’ll even break down and go to a library.

The fact that it’s supposed to pour again all day tomorrow (well, today at this point) means that at least the “go outside more” part of this plan won’t start until Wednesday, but I think putting my finger on the problem will at least help me address it.

I’ve come down with a truly delightful stomach bug, so my ability to do pretty much anything beyond what I absolutely have to do is somewhat restrained.

Normally I’d have something much longer about the whole Jaypocalypse/Conandrum fiasco playing out in slow motion on NBC, but to be frank, I really don’t have the energy to write up my feelings on what is, at its heart, a battle for the future of television.

Instead, please enjoy this embed of last night’s Jimmy Kimmel show (no, really, it is quite funny). It’s an absolutely savage parody of Leno’s show, particularly in the way that he relies on the band to prop up every single limp joke.

Hopefully more to come when I feel a bit less like I’m in certain scenes from Parasites Lost.

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!

Click this link to the Air Quality map for the greater Los Angeles area. Hover over zone 2, Northwest Coastal L.A. County.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 50 (yellow), that’s bad, and I am probably cranky and complaining a bit about my athsma, but mostly just being bored and unemployed and watching too much TV.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 100 (orange), that’s awful, and I am probably completely miserable and whining about nothing but how much my lungs hate me.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 150 (red), that’s atrocious, and either a) I’m dead, b) I’m in the hospital, or c) I’ve grabbed the cat and just started driving someplace where I can actually fucking breathe, and will send for my stuff at a later date.

Repeat for the next week or two to know how my life is going.

A quick trip to Denver for a family wedding seems to have cleared out my lungs pretty well, and the progress that’s been made in terms of getting the fire contained and directed away from LA proper seems to have done the trick in stopping the series of asthma attacks I was having last week.

This is a phenomenal set of time-lapses from August 30th, when the fire really started raging out of control, which will go a long ways towards explaining why I was so goddamn miserable for a couple of weeks.

That video is ONE DAY of smoke being shot into the air around L.A., and it did that or worse every day for almost a week and a half. I don’t even live that close to the fire, but it’s easy to see how bad things got for those amongst us with craptastic lungs.

I’ve been back in LA for a few days. My timing was miserable, showing up just as the forested hills around the city decided to burst into flames.

There have been fires here before, and they’ve aggravated my lungs a bit, but nothing’s set off my asthma like the giant fire that’s still burning almost completely out of control tonight.

My one attempt to work out since getting home ended rather disastrously after half an hour on Thursday, having to come home and use my inhaler like I used to when I was a kid and just a little exercise would set my lungs off.

I haven’t had to use my inhaler daily in years, but I’ve had to every day since then. And that’s without working out at all.

What gets me is that the smoke really isn’t that bad in my neighborhood – It’s certainly not as bad as when there was a smaller, much closer fire a couple of years ago. That fire was only three or four miles away at its worst point (I could smell the smoke much more distinctly), and I don’t think I had to use my inhaler once.

I don’t know if it’s the lack of transition after being up in the bracingly clear, thin air of Idaho for a week, or if there’s something in my air conditioner (running non-stop for the first time in well over a year) that’s making my lungs even angrier.

The bottom line is, I’m stuck at home, waiting for the air to clear out, unable to get my stress out through working out, and feeling like my old, fat, sickly self as I manage to need a hit off the inhaler from the strenuous effort of watching TV.

I thought I was losing my mind before I left. I thought the walls were closing in on me before.

I’d been a little reluctant to go to a family event in Denver this coming weekend. Now I wish I’d decided to spend this week there, because at least I could fucking breathe.

I am tired of a few things right about now:

• unemployment
• being worried about my cat being sick
• my cat actually being sick
• my wireless router constantly flaking on me
• falling back into my natural sleep pattern of 2am-9am
• having to adjust to my new orthotics
• having to get out of the pool while I still have a ton of energy because there’s a line
• being so stressed I still have a ton of energy after swimming 2.5km
• not having a job
• the fact that I’m grinding my teeth when I’m awake now
• my unemployment check being late
• the entire female reproductive process and all the joy it entails
• the four walls of my apartment
• little earthquakes causing petrifying fear of bigger ones
• having to constantly rejigger the numbers of when, exactly, I’m going to go broke
• the continuing need for physical therapy exercises on my bad foot.
• needing a goddamn job.

Some of these won’t be changing any time soon, but the current combination is quickly turning me into a complete fucking crazy person.

Tuesday was my last day. With me fighting off the lingering last bits of a nasty chest cold and Chaplin putting another spin of not-funny on the Six Million Dollar Cat joke with a UTI, maybe this isn’t the worst time for me to be unemployed.

I will say though, the fact that this chesty, coughing nastiness is keeping me out of the gym is not helping. I’m certainly catching up on TiVo faster than I thought I would, but I need to be working out and taking advantage of the fact that there is no crafty truck to gorge myself on.

Resumes are out, calls have been made, and more calls will be made next week when I have updated information. Until then, me and TiVo and Chaplin are just going to hang.