news from the land of the non-flu

I have been sick for the last week, and according to my doctor, it looked like the flu and walked like the flu but was not the flu. I barely ate anything all week and pretty much stayed in bed with a fever. When I could eat, it was the BRAT diet (bananas, rice, applesauce and toast). It was mostly Not Fun.

I had lots of time to read Wikipedia, catch up on the blogs and do a lot of napping. I also spent some time contemplating why many intelligent grown people cannot use proper punctuation to distinguish between contractions and possessives ("you're" vs. "your", "it's" vs. "its") or between plurals and possessives ("cats" vs. "cat's"). This first started off as indignant and self-righteous, but quickly progressed beyond the judgmental to the illness-induced philosophical. Maybe it's unnatural. Maybe there's just something wrong with me! You can take the girl out of the egghead linguistics department...

Well, it only took a week, but it looks like I survived the non-flu. I'm mostly better, apart from some lingering weirdness in the kishkes and an occasional coughing fit.

Yesterday I even ate three regular meals, including pizza and spicy food. I even had the energy to cook dinner last night (trying to make up for last week, when Jacob would arrive home at 7 PM and I'd have to say, "Sorry I didn't get dinner started; I had to open a bottle of juice earlier today and then I had to go lie down. No, I'm not hungry"). We had hot and sour sweet potato curry, brown rice and baby collards (local potatoes + greens!). No issues except it was probably too soon for me to be drinking a entire glass of milk. So far, so good.

An inadvertent side-effect of the non-flu was that I had to stop drinking coffee. I had been nursing a small but unmistakable addiction--just one cup a day, but woe betide me if I didn't have that one cup. When I got sick, I lost my appetite for everything, including coffee, and the withdrawal symptoms were unnoticeable amidst the general malaise. Today is the first day I would have even considered coffee, but when I got up I made myself some nice darjeeling tea instead. I don't really even miss it. Yet.

Another side note: I was on a quest for organic, HFCS-free Saltine-like crackers once I started feeling a little better. I was happy to find Suzie's 100% Organic Crackers at our local co-op, but dismayed once I opened the package to find twelve individually-wrapped servings. Why? Why??? If I want a portable individual serving of crackers, I can put eight crackers in a reusable container myself. Moreover, this is not a magical power that only I possess. Maybe they're concerned with the crackers going stale? In that case, there's got to be a better way.

In other news, we ventured out to the farmers' market in the cold yesterday, and then to the library to continue our mission of building a fort out of gardening books. I mean, checking out gardening books, ostensibly to somehow apply the information inside them to our yard.

This will be our first spring here, and we're trying not to bite off more than we can chew. It's not like we are going to be able to grow everything we like to eat. We sat down and made "Top 5" wish lists of vegetables, and figured out how many of each thing we'll be able to maintain. But we know it'll be mostly trial-and-error. Luckily, we are also going halvesies with my parents on a CSA share from Avian Mead Organics this season, so between that, the garden and the farmers' market, we should be able to have all the produce we need.

In other other news, I am supposed to be catching up on work now that I'm feeling better, so naturally my computer speakers won't turn on (part of what I do involves listening to interview audio). It's always something.