We've been getting over the flu here at Casa del Ganger. For the past several weeks, I've been feeling under the weather to a greater or lesser extent, so I'd slow down and try to get extra rest, etc. After a few days I'd feel better, so I'd go back to normal life, and whammo! a couple of days later, down I'd go again.
Last week and weekend, however, was the absolute bottom of this cycle. I struggled along the week slowly feeling more and more like crud scraped off the bottom of the Coney Island boardwalk, and when Friday finally arrived I almost decided to postpone the Auspex move. In the end, I didn't postpone it because I'd already done so once. So I got up on Saturday, went to breakfast with a friend, then came back home and hauled the Auspex out and got it ready for transport. The new owner showed up right on time and right around noon, we had it loaded into his rental truck and were pulling away from the house for the trip down to Factoria. I had my new Qtek 9100 Windows Mobile PDA/cell phone with me so I could tell Steph when we were done unloading it and getting it set up. A couple more hours later and I was sitting at McDonald's waiting for my family, entering my first blog entry on my geektoy.
When we got home (minus a detour through Costco Home), I intended to lay down for two hours or so and take a refreshing nap, since I felt like hammered crap. Instead, I woke up at midnight when Steph crawled into bed. I went back to bed and ended up sleeping most of Sunday.
Of course, Murphy was having none of this -- so Steph started coming down with it too.
This week, I've been on the mend, although I'm still sadly lacking in energy. I've been going to bed by 8:30 most nights. On the upside, I've been getting up nice and early -- anywhere from 4:30 to 7:00 -- so I've had plenty of time to get my work done. I'm just running out of steam awfully quickly though, and if I'm tempted to think I'm completely healthy, all I have to do is plot when my energy falls off. Nobody who can tell exactly when their last dose of acetaminophen wore off by noting that the sudden loss of energy is exactly eight hours past the last pill-ingestion has any business deluding themselves about being healthy.
As an aside, reading Stephen King's uncut version of The Stand probably isn't a great idea when you're sick. I felt like I was drowning in phlegm a little too often last weekend to be comfortable reading about the superflu that killed people by drowning them in phlegm. I finally realized that the reason I kept reading it was that even as sick as I felt, I took a certain perverse pleasure in not being as sick as those poor bastards.
Speaking of perverse pleasures, Steph and I scared a truck driver this morning on the way back from taking the kids to school. On our way up to school Steph noticed a Guinness truck parked at the local Canyons and idly commented that it was too bad we didn't have our camera with us, since it would be funny to get a picture of me in front of the truck.
Enter the geektoy -- the Qtek 9100 Windows Mobile 5.0 PDA and cell phone, with integrated 1.3 megapixel camera. You, being an astute reader, can probably see where this is going...
So that was a good start to the day. It was book-ended by what may be a quite awesome ending to the day -- we'll see if things pan out the way I hope they do.
[Ed: "What's an Auspex?" I hear many of you say. "Why the heck are you wasting two posts about this stupid thing?" Well, Auspex was a company in the 1990s that made very high-end file servers. The model I had, an Auspex NS5500, cost around three-quarters of a million dollars when it was manufactured and sold in 1990 and represented the pinnacle of non-mainframe computer engineering. It was a 7-foot tall, 700lbs. black metal cabinet chock full of computery file server goodness. At one point I contacted Auspex to find out what it would take to refurbish it and the tech I was talking to exclaimed, "Oh! That's where that one went!" You see, these were the kind of computers you didn't just buy, use for a couple of years, then throw away; they usually got traded back to Auspex as part of an upgrade cycle. The story about how I came to own it will have to wait for another day.]