I just fin­ished read­ing the all three books that are cur­rent­ly avail­able in the Mor­ris & Chas­tain Super­nat­ur­al Inves­ti­ga­tions series by Justin Gus­tai­nis. I have no com­plaints about Black Mag­ic Woman or Evil Ways, which hang togeth­er pret­ty close­ly.

Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il, though, end­ed with a cliffhang­er! How dare he! The read­er is left com­plete­ly unsure of the fate of one of the main two char­ac­ters, as well as sev­er­al oth­ers who were piv­otal to the plot. Hon­est­ly, any­body who is read­ing vol­ume three of a series has proven enough com­mit­ment that there’s sim­ply no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for such a cheap tac­tic. Bah!

It is just too bloody hot. I could­n’t sleep last night and it’s too dan­ged hot to sleep again tonight. I do not enjoy sum­mer weath­er.

And now I have it, too. Damn it. I had tried to get back to blog­ging dai­ly, but good inten­tions just did­n’t hold a can­dle against the entire house­hold com­ing down with the flu.¹

For some rea­son I thought Tam­i­flu was a one or two-pill affair, but I sup­pose I had it con­fused with one of the oth­er antivi­rals. I have to take this for ten days! And appar­ent­ly it gives quite a few peo­ple stom­ach flu symp­toms on top of the mis­ery they’re already in or try­ing to avoid. Hap­pi­ly, that isn’t hap­pen­ing to me so far.

I’m not feel­ing very chat­ty, though. So I think I’m going to curl up with the new deliv­ery of mail­box books from the library and apply myself to some brain­less read­ing. Any­thing that requires brain will have to be sent back and request­ed again some oth­er time, because I won’t be able to appre­ci­ate it. (I admit­ted that I was sick when I kept re-read­ing the same few pages of Halt­ing State with absolute­ly no trace of com­pre­hen­sion.) Now I wish I’d made dif­fer­ent selec­tions!

That should­n’t be worth post­ing about, but it took more work than it should have. Sum­ma­ry: I prob­a­bly should have stuck with Log­itech wire­less keyboard/mouse com­bi­na­tions, because I did­n’t have a prob­lem with the pre­vi­ous set I had and nev­er had occa­sion to call their tech­ni­cal sup­port. But since I bought a Microsoft prod­uct, it was worth­while to hound them until they came through on their war­ran­ty, despite the fact that the expe­ri­ence was some­what painful.

I had a pain doc­tor appoint­ment last week, but was­n’t up to going. So Sam resched­uled it for me, and I head­ed across town today.

Appar­ent­ly this was the day for “fit­ting in” every­body who has can­celed an appoint­ment in the last God­dess-knows-how-long, because I arrived to find no park­ing (even on the street in front of the prac­tice). Patience was reward­ed, and I got a spot that opened up as some­one left, and was still 20 min­utes ear­ly for my appoint­ment.

I was seen short­ly before the woman who came in after me, after stop­ping to glare at me from her street­side park­ing space (hey, it was­n’t as if she had been in the lot wait­ing or any­thing!). Her appoint­ment was actu­al­ly 15 min­utes before mine, so I have no idea why they saw me first.

Still, I was very glad to have my a back-up ebook on my PDA, because it took over 2 hours to get out of there. They usu­al­ly run absolute­ly on-time, so I only had one “nor­mal” book with me, and I fin­ished it.¹ That office is always so over­heat­ed, so I was real­ly dozy by the time I left.

Sam and I agreed that I had no busi­ness dri­ving very far, so I got some fruit and water and went to his work­place. I had a brief nap, then he was off work and we were off to fill my pre­scrip­tions. We com­mit­ted naugh­ti­ness by grab­bing piz­za for din­ner, but it was yum­my naugh­ti­ness.

This is the man’s “Old Farts” gam­ing night, when he meets up with some of his bud­dies and they play what­ev­er they can agree on. The girl is going out with friends to see Watch­men (again), so I think I may be going to bed ear­ly.

First, I need to close some tabs in my brows­er, but I want­ed to share the links with you! (You’re SO lucky!)

Elf Detec­tion 101: How to find the hid­den folk of Ice­land.
Read the sto­ries on the Neb­u­la bal­lot!
It’s Read An eBook Week! So cel­e­brate by down­load­ing some of the free eBooks list­ed on their site 🙂

Bah. I don’t feel good and I can’t sleep any more and I’m the only one awake. There’s a very child­ish part of me that wants very much to find a way to wake Sam up so I won’t be alone. No, I would­n’t feel any bet­ter, but darn it, I’d have com­pa­ny!

But I’m not actu­al­ly 3 years old, so I won’t do that.

Yes­ter­day, I had a cough­ing fit that start­ed around 5 am. It was turn­ing into an asthma/anxiety attack, so Sam brought me a Xanax. I don’t take those often at all, as evi­denced by the fact that the bot­tle I have was a one-month sup­ply pre­scribed 4 or 5 years ago. One of the rea­sons I don’t take them often is that they knock me out com­plete­ly. I could bare­ly man­age to get the oat­meal Sam made for break­fast from bowl to mouth, and yes, I end­ed up wear­ing some. The spoon was just too tech­ni­cal for me at that point.

I was com­plete­ly uncon­scious (but not cough­ing!) by the time Sam left for work. Katie checked in on me peri­od­i­cal­ly, and appar­ent­ly gave me some Dayquil around 2:30. Sam called to check on me a cou­ple of times, but what­ev­er was said is a mys­tery to me, as I was in a ben­zo­di­azepine coma. I think I final­ly got up around 6pm, after he was home again.

I just could­n’t shake the grog­gi­ness, though. For the first time ever, we had to re-sched­ule our reg­u­lar “date night” because I was a zom­bie. Back to bed with me, then—and I did­n’t even remem­ber to take my nor­mal sleepy-time meds. I was vague­ly aware of Sam com­ing to bed at some point.

At about 2:30, my body informed me that we were Done Sleep­ing and would now move on to baby­ing my tum­my.

I had not one, but two cell­phones die in just a few months last year (or the year before? I’m fuzzy on it now). We have replace­ment insur­ance on our phones, but the com­pa­ny takes a few days to get the replace­ment to us. Since we don’t have a land line any more, I felt espe­cial­ly iso­lat­ed each time.

The “insur­ance” com­pa­ny (Assu­ri­on) also does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly pro­vide the same mod­el (or brand) phone as a replace­ment 🙁 After the first inci­dent, I got a real­ly nice Nokia phone. After the sec­ond one, they did­n’t have any­thing like that avail­able, so I end­ed up with a Motoro­la that isn’t near­ly as sweet.

I was read­ing Eileen Wilks’ Tempt­ing Dan­ger and most­ly enjoy­ing it, until I hit one of the sex scenes. And then, she wrote some­thing like, “This time ada­gio,¹ rather than for­tis­si­mo.²″

There was­n’t one edi­tor or proof­read­er with any musi­cal knowl­edge? Those are very basic terms.

Of course, at one point a char­ac­ter’s name changes from “Therese” to “Jose­fa” with no expla­na­tion. And while I won’t swear to it, I’m pret­ty sure that the orga­ni­za­tion called “Church of the Redeemer” had a dif­fer­ent name at one point (“Church of the Exalt­ed” maybe).

It’s 90 degrees F out­side now. It was 103 ear­li­er. We’re still in the first week of June. I have no idea what the “effec­tive tem­per­a­ture” (or what­ev­er they call it) is when the humid­i­ty is fac­tored in.

Even with month­ly fil­ter changes and win­dow units in both bed­rooms, the air con­di­tion­er just can’t keep up.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I don’t have any rea­son to think we’ll be able to move to points north before we find out what it’s going to be like here in July and August.

Ugh.

Aren’t there any Cana­di­ans who want to adopt a nice fam­i­ly of three?

That’s pret­ty much my opinoin today. Blah. Blah blah blah. I could­n’t wake up enough to dri­ve safe­ly, so I missed an appoint­ment that will take months to resched­ule.

For every assign­ment we do in the tech writ­ing course I’m tak­ing, we turn in a rough draft and receive two peer reviews and feed­back from the instruc­tor before doing the final draft. I got the two peer reviews this morn­ing from the assign­ment I turned in on Sun­day, and they were ridicu­lous. Seriously–both reviews were full of non­sense like, “your sub­mis­sion was­n’t dou­ble-spaced” (that’s because the instruc­tions said to sin­gle space it, doo­fus) or “there aren’t dou­ble spaces between the para­graphs” (yes, there are–I dou­ble-checked) or “you have to spell it ‘co-hous­ing’ ” (not when the author­i­ties in the field spell the word ‘cohous­ing’ kid).

They get grad­ed on their peer reviews, as I’ve been on mine, so hope­ful­ly they’ll get sucky grades. I got count­ed down on one of the first ones I did because I was­n’t harsh enough. Yes, that per­son­’s piece need­ed a lot of work, and I could have ripped it to shreds. I was try­ing to stay “con­ge­nial” as instruct­ed. My true thoughts were more along the lines of, “Why are you in this course? Only TCOM majors need to take it, and oh please $deity do NOT tell me you’re major­ing in TCOM when you can hard­ly write a read­able sen­tence.” That would­n’t have been con­ge­nial, would it?

The idea behind the peer reviews is that most tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tors work in teams now, so we have to get used to giv­ing each oth­er con­struc­tive crit­i­cism and accept­ing the same. I can han­dle that. I don’t, how­ev­er, see why peo­ple who can’t man­age to sort out “there” and “their,” or who don’t under­stand that an apos­tro­phe does not mean HERE COMES AN “S” are even per­mit­ted in the course. They’re all sup­posed to have passed the basic Eng­lish cours­es before tak­ing any­thing in the TCOM depart­ment, but obvi­ous­ly “pass­ing” and “mas­ter­ing the mate­r­i­al” are not close­ly relat­ed con­cepts.