December 2004 Archives

After thinking Monday morning that my cold had crested, as the day wore on I began to feel worse, and Tuesday morning it was clear that I wasn't going to be able to function at work, so I called in sick. This morning I woke up feeling not a lot better, but concerned about taking any more time off, so I medicated myself and went in. The place was dead; almost all of the students took leave this week, and my inbox--normally overfull and over quota after only a day or two away--had only a dozen or so new messages since I left on vacation last Thursday. After four hours of pretty much just staring blankly into space, and of hearing how bad I sounded and looked, I decided to leave at lunchtime and take the rest of the day off. I actually don't feel any worse today than yesterday--though that might be the result of the constant stream of cold medication--but the cough and congestion that started in my head have moved to my chest, where they've deepened a little. I have a huskiness that would make Lauren Bacall proud.

So I've spent the afternoon drinking juice, eating soup, and resting, while waiting for Jeff to get back into town tonight (he should be touching down at DCA in about half an hour) so I can bundle up and go pick him up at the airport and welcome him home. He has tomorrow off; I'll probably try to go back in. Friday we fly up to Boston, to ring in the New Year with a college friend of his who's in grad school at my old alma mater. Let's hope this cold really is over by then; I ran into a colleague this morning who is in his third week with something similar, that started like mine as a sinus/head cold and then moved into his chest, with his cough worsening to the point that he pulled a muscle while coughing over the weekend. One week of this is plenty for me, thank you very much.

Along with so many others, I've spent the Christmas holidays sick. In the previous two entries, I wrote about feeling sick Thursday through Saturday, and my hope that I would shake it off by Sunday.

I didn't. In fact, after another horrible night Saturday of practically no sleep (even in a comfortable bed at my mom's house), due to the cough from the cold/sinus infection and the bouts of acid reflux, I didn't even get up until noon on Sunday, and then mostly just moved back and forth between the recliner in the living room (until the arguing between my nephews would drive me back to bed in order to try to find some quiet), the bedroom (until the arguing between my nephews would drive me back to the living room to tell them to shut up), and the bathroom. Mom and I did go over to my sister's house in the evening and then on to my cousin's for a little while--where I did rally for a bit to play their new air hockey table, reigning undefeated for the evening, but gasping for air between rounds--but after a couple of hours I asked Mom if we could go home, and I went to bed shortly after getting back. You can tell I wasn't feeling well, since I didn't even get online at all on Sunday.

Today I'm still very tired and congested--with watery eyes, runny nose, sneezing and a cough that continues to deepen--and still experiencing the reflux, though at least I'm back home now where my bottle of Prilosec (which I'd not needed for months) is available, so the esophageal burning, at least, should be over soon.

The trip back to Arlington today was fine--fortunately, traffic was light this afternoon--and I didn't get overly tired driving back, though the blockage in my ears was a little painful since I couldn't equalize the pressure as I drove into and out of the mountains. Since getting home, though, I've had a nice meal of French onion soup and there's a warm kitty--happy to see me--snuggling by my side. I'm supposed to go back to work tomorrow, so we'll see how I'm feeling in the morning.

In what seems to be the continuation of a pattern, I'm sick on my trip home. I noted that I had a sore throat and chills Thursday morning when I drove down here; the sore throat and chills have continued, to be joined by sneezing, coughing and a mild fever. Additionally, though unrelated, my acid reflux came back with a vengeance last night, and I slept fitfully at my sister's house, and the burning has continued off and on all day.

Otherwise, though, the day went reasonably well, though it's so noticeable that our numbers are dwindling, with my father's death last year, my grandfather's this year, and my grandmother's confinement to her room--not that she's present in anything but very weak body. My nephews had a few fights, but nothing out of the ordinary, and my sister and I didn't argue once; I think feeling sick all day has taken a lot of the fight out of me, and I just let a lot of comments wash over me to which I might otherwise have responded.

The day dawned as a whitish Christmas--there was a very heavy frost last night (it's been quite cold here; 60 degrees in Arlington when I left Thursday noon, the temperature had falled into the low thirties by the time I reached Covington that evening, and has lingered in the teens since) that remained on the ground well into the morning.

My mother loved the orchids I'd sent that arrived yesterday, and was very excited over her main present: I've offered to take her to New York sometime this spring, where we'll see some musicals, have some good food, and do some shopping and sightseeing.

I received some nice gifts, including two books from my Amazon.com wishlist, the hardbound version of Neil Gaiman's 1602 for Marvel, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book). My mom gave us a nice set of wine accessories, and a cool infusing tea pot (coincidentally, Jeff and I recently had begun drinking tea most evenings, something my mom didn't know, so this will come very much in handy), among a number of other gifts.

Now I'm back at Mom's house, sitting in my sleep bottoms and sweatshirt, thinking about lying on the couch and reading (I've already finished the 1602 graphic novel earlier today, and have started in on America (The Book), and then going to bed relatively early. With luck, I'll shake off this cold by tomorrow.

Yesterday I drove down to my hometown for the holidays. I woke up with a sore throat and mild chills, so I took my time preparing to leave, heading out around noon rather than the usual 7:30-8:00. The drive, which normally takes about three and a half hours, this time took a white-knuckled near five, the first two (with what I thought was unusually heavy outbound traffic for noon, even on the day before Christmas Eve) just to drive the 74 miles from home out I-66 to I-81, and much of the next hundred miles in rain so heavy that there were times the road in front of me wasn't visible and the skies looked more like 3am rather than 3pm. It was bad enough to be feeling a little under the weather, without being literally under oppressive weather. The rain finally ended about 50 miles before the end of the trip, though, making way for beautiful blue, nearly cloudless skies, and giving me the opportunity to start to relax my grip on the wheel and prepare for the new set of stresses sure to await me once with my family. <grin>

Last night actually was pretty relaxing; Mom was baking cookies when I walked in the door, and was ready to heat up a pot of chili she'd made earlier that day. I spent the rest of the day visiting and taking it easy, and getting to bed relatively early.

Today hasn't been too bad, either. There's been some tension, of course, once at my sister's house, but nothing out of the ordinary. She hosted about 30 family members, as she does every Christmas Eve, and after everyone left to attend church, I headed next door to Mom's in order to check my email, browse my RSS feeds, and leave this posting. Unfortunately, very slow dialup makes this a pretty painful process, and it's pretty unlikely I'll be able to upload any photos until I'm back in Arlington.

After I finish with my Internet routine, I'll head back over to my sister's; my mom and I are spending the night there, as we do every Christmas Eve as well, so that we'll be there when the nephews wake up tomorrow morning (however, it turns out that the youngest of the three had his Santa "awakening" this year, so there's no longer a need for me to play Santa, putting together toys at 2am, or finishing off the cookies and soda left at the fireplace; I'll just be able to go over and go to bed).

• Our Internet connectivity at work came back up yesterday afternoon at 4:30. However, that was mostly academic, since I wasn't really able to get online since:
• I'm acting division head today in my boss's absence, which means, of course, that everything that could go wrong has waited until today to do so.
• No time for lunch. Again, ant that's becoming too much of a habit. So it was a slice of cold pizza from the cafeteria while working at my desk.
• Yet again, one of the rare shows on television that I actively seek out, and truly love, is getting the axe. As Gene reports, Showtime's Dead Like Me has been cancelled. Ah well, at least now I'll have more time for my Flickr addiction.
• The morning commute, normally easy--just a mile or so to drop Jeff off at the Pentagon City metro station, and then another three back to my office--was made much more difficult--on the morning when, as acting director, I had to be here on-time for a meeting with my boss's boss's boss--by a bizarre accident very early this morning near the Pentagon, when a fuel tanker crashed and exploded at the Washington Boulevard exit off I-395. This is only about half a mile from the condo, if that, but although the news reports indicate that the resulting explosions woke residents all over the county, I don't remember hearing anything--then again, I wear heavy-duty earplugs due to my nightly proximity to a Very Loud Snorer. Gene, however, who lives about a mile from this morning's accident, reports that the noise, like thunder, did wake him.
• On the more positive side, I was majorly cruised this morning by one of the young junior foreign service officers--and a very hot one, he was--here for language training. That's always a nice ego stroke.

As Jeff noted in his blog, on Saturday night we drove out to Bull Run Regional Park in Centreville for the "Miracle of Lights" drive-through holiday light display. The Saturday right before Christmas might not have been the smartest time to go, and there were very long lines of cars to get in and through; it was also priced at $12 per car, which given the expected 35,000+ cars during the time that it's open will net them a very handy profit (to be fair, to be given to charity and to the regional parks) even after the $10,000 light bill is paid. Given that we didn't have an SUV crammed full of nuclear family (we were definitely in the minority, only one of two Priuses the guy taking our money had seen that night), I thought the fee was a bit high for just two of us, but it was nice to get out of the house and into the countryside--dwindling as it is--of the further Northern Virginia suburbs, and to experience some Christmas lights, since we didn't do much decorating ourselves. We took a number of pictures there, but given that I was driving the car, that the exposures needed to be long because of the dark, and because I'm not all that great a photographer to begin with, mine all turned out blurry; rather than let that defeat me, though, I took the digitized photos and played with them some, giving them a new life as a kind of digital lite-brite art exhibit. Jeff got some nice shots of the actual lights, though.

Both sets of photos, as well as others we've taken, are on Flickr, which we've both mentioned over and over. Really, it's the coolest photo community on the web (and Salon thinks so, too). Check it out.

Ah, it's 4:30 and everyone else has left for the day, leaving me in peace and giving me a chance to check my email and post this entry. Any remaining unresolved issues are now someone else's problem; starting tomorrow, I'm on leave from the office until next Tuesday.

Friday afternoon, just minutes before the end of the work day, the Internet connectivity at work went down. This morning it was still down--apparently our bureau and one or two others were taken off the Internet because of a suspicion of a trojan horse--but we were told that it would be back up today. Around 11:00, though, we were sent a broadcast email that said that Internet access would be unavailable "indefinitely." Within a few minutes after that, but completely unrelated, the power went out and we didn't even have computer access at all, much less to the Internet. An hour and a half later, just ten minutes before the director was due to decide whether to just send us all home for the day, the power came back on. The Internet connectivity, though, never was re-established, making this the longest day I've spent at work in a long time: no Flickr, no blogging, no reading blogs, no last-minute Christmas shopping online, no checking my email. And after work I had an appointment downtown for a haircut, after which Jeff and I planned to have dinner, so I'm only just now finally getting to the net for the first time in 14 hours.

[pleasurable sigh]

Some days I really enjoy being at work. Oh, it's not so much that the tasks themselves are any less tedious or any more challenging on these days, but that sometimes I just become aware of the physical location, which really is quite nice for a bureau of a Big Government Agency.

This morning, walking across the campus to the cafeteria building--we're primarily a training and educational institution--and finding myself the only one out of doors at that moment, I was struck not only by the sunlight and clear blue skies anyone in the metropolitan area might have experienced but also by the acres of open space and wooded hills not generally enjoyed--at least not outside a college campus or other academic-minded government facility, like NASA or NIH--in an office this close to downtown. Sometimes just being able to get outside and enjoy the cold fresh air and sunlight, or to walk in or sit under the trees, almost makes up for the slow intellectual death the seems to be the inherent result of civil service.

So, here we are, little more than a week away from Christmas, and in fact only a week away from my heading down to my mom's for the holiday, and I've yet to do a single bit of Christmas shopping. Normally someone who loves shopping, I think of Christmas gift shopping nonetheless as a horribly painful chore, perhaps the worst of the perennial stressors.

And I don't even have to buy that many gifts, really: Jeff and I have agreed that we'll buy something nice for the condo, an attractive, well-made piece of furniture--probably a dresser or chest of drawers for the bedroom, or both--rather than worry too much about individual gifts (and we won't be together at Christmas anyway, it being a holiday of more importance to our families than to us); and my nephews prefer and will get cash, though I'm not so sure about the oldest, who just having sent me an invitation to join Falwell's Moral Majority (hello, Matt, yes I know you're reading this) might receive only coal.

That really leaves just three gifts I have to buy:

1. My sister and brother-in-law, who keep telling me not to get them anything since I buy for their three kids, but since they'll get me something even though I've told them for years not to, I'll reciprocate. Anyway, they're not particularly difficult to buy for.
2. The member of my family whose name I got in the Secret Santa draw. I had suggested for years that my family stop giving gifts all around, and just draw names. They eventually took to the idea, with one twist; they still give to everyone, but the person whose name is drawn gets an extra. Sigh.
3. My mom, aka the toughest person in the world to buy for. She has a number of rules: no candy, no tchotchkes, no perfume, no clothes (with the occasional exception of permitting me, whose taste she apparently doesn't mind, to get her a holiday sweater, almost a tradition), etc. She expects something dramatic and unusual, yet practical. At the same time, if she wants something she goes out and buys it, so there's nothing she really wants or needs come December. She doesn't need money, and would consider a gift of money an insult anyway. But not giving her a gift at all would be at least as great an insult; she puts a lot of thought into gift-giving, and enjoys it, so she's never able to accept that other people not only don't relish it, but find it stressful and unpleasant, and she puts a lot of stock in what one gets her.

Last year, I offered to take her to London. Afraid of flying, however, she declined. This year I'd like to offer to take her to New York for shopping and some shows, something I know she'd like, but I'm concerned that it would be an inadequate gift from her perspective because there's not really anything to unwrap, nothing physical to hold or show off.

So I'll continue to stress over it a few more days, probably go find an unusual but attractive sweater again, buy her some roses, calligraph an invitation to New York, and hope it's enough. And then sit back and wait for next Saturday to come and go so I won't have to feel this stress again... at least until Mother's Day.

Does anyone know anything about Doc Scantlin and His Imperial Palms Orchestra, specifically their "Swizzle" supper club performances at the Ronald Reagan Building? From their web site, and given that they've performed at such high-society weddings as that of Madeleine Albright's daughter, and of Alexandra Miller and Alexander von Furstenburg, they sound fun but potentially very straight, in which case I'm not sure we'd want to spend the money to go (e.g., if we'd have to sit out the dancing). But at the same time they're advertising in the Washington Blade each week, so I'm wondering if the crowd tends to be pretty gay-friendly. If so, it sounds like it could be a lot of fun for Jeff and me to do as a special night out of dinner and dancing to a big-band sound.

In my immediately previous entry, I described a dream in which I was the superhero brother of The Incredibles's Elastigirl, but in that posting I didn't detail my own superpowers. I noted that during this dream, I had remained aware at some level that I was, in fact, dreaming; my superpowers actually were impacted by that awareness, changing on the spot in ways that mimic my own conscious imaginings of what superpowers I'd want to possess.

As a little kid I most often thought about desiring the power of invisibility or teleportation. My thoughts about the latter persisted, albeit changed somewhat--my reading of Zelazny's Amber series, my learning of the law of similarity in magic systems, and my interest in quantum mechanics leading me to a limited form of teleportation in which places, roads or the like with the same name could be merged together, or folded like space, so that for an instant they would be the same, and one could start at one such but exit at another--even to adulthood, especially during long road trips when I'd see route numbers or highway names near my starting point that were named or numbered the same as routes and roads nearer my intended destination.

But mostly as an adult I wanted one of two powers: weather control, like the X-Men's Storm, or shapeshifting, which I also liked since it seemed a bit of a cheat, giving you multiple other powers depending on what shape you chose--e.g., flight, if you became a bird; near-invisibility, if you became a "fly on the wall"; water-breathing; walking through doors, or at least under them or through keyholes, by becoming a small insect; etc. Shapeshifting generally won out for its utilitarian benefits, though for sheer drama you can't really beat summoning up a small tornado or throwing lightning bolts.

More recently, though, I've become fascinated by another power--a more intellectual superpower--that I don't think I've come across in my own exploration of the genre. It's a subtle power that doesn't lend itself well to the action of comics or movies, and that on a typical mission would probably find you not out fighting the bad guys but back in the mission room monitoring everyone's radio communications, or manning the X-Jet, yet one that under the right circumstances could accomplish amazing things, some of which would be difficult given any other power. I'm talking about the power of perfect and absolute communication, the ability instantly to understand and be fluent in any language or communication system, written, oral or even non-verbal, mechanical or alien (not just translate Ancient Sumerian cuneiform with ease and speak fluent Arabic at will, but perhaps even dance with honeybees, sniff out the territorial clues of mammals, program computers as easily as talking to a friend, etc.). These days, that's the power I want.

In my dream, then, I kept switching back and forth between the shapeshifting of my more earlier adulthood wishes--in order to get close to or keep away from the omnidroid, as needed--and the perfect communication power of my more recent fantasies, suspecting that I might be able to disarm the robotic killer if I could just get access to its programming, effectively rewriting it on the fly, or even communicating with it wirelessly and achieving the same end without having even to get close to it.

Alas, the dream ended before I got that far. I do find myself wishing, though, I had the artistic or writing talent to explore drawing or narrating the continuing adventures of this hero. At this point, I don't even have a name for him; I'm just pretty sure I don't want to call him the Cunning Linguist.

Strange dreams last night. In the one from which I eventually woke, my father was still alive but had called me into his bedroom to tell me privately that he'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and had only four to six months to live. He had important information about his finances that he wanted me to know, so he handed me a Palm Pilot on which he had encrypted the information, and told me to input the pass phrase he was about to give me in order to make sure that I could access the information later. As he spoke the phrase, I mistakenly typed in a homonym for one of the words rather than the correct word, and a security program immediately began to erase all the data on the device. My father was furious with me for typing incorrectly, and it turned out that he didn't have a backup of the data anywhere else, so all the information was gone. There would now be no way to get at any of his savings or investments, leaving my mother with no support, and he blamed me. At that point in the dream, I fell to the floor, sobbing, in a fetal position, and couldn't even speak to my mother when she came to find out what was wrong.

My earlier dream of the night was disturbing in its own way, but at the same time less realistic, a fact of wh

We had a jam-packed weekend, about which Jeff posted partway through, providing a glimpse of our basic itinerary. Friday night, as he noted, we saw Chanticleer in concert at George Mason University's Center for the Performing Arts. They were, as usual and as expected, nearly flawless (with only the very first selection not seeming quite up to their usual standard of excellence); it was a delightful evening.

On Saturday, after a late breakfast and some necessary errands, we took the three-hour drive down to the Hampton Roads area for a holiday party that evening, where we indulged in amazingly delicious hors-d'oeuvres accompanied by cocktails, champagne and some very good wine. We also spoke again with a gaming friend of Shel's we'd first met when we visited back in October, a charmingly earnest and intriguing woman, and we also were introduced to some very cool new people, including a couple from the Maryland suburbs of DC, and an adorable young man with whom I spent the waning hours of the party--after Jeff had retired a little earlier with a headache--engaged in talking politics and commiserating about the sad state of civil liberties and intellectualism in the current American political climate. I was somewhat surprised to find someone so very intelligent and with such a strong liberal--or at least libertarian--bent in the person of a near-lifelong resident of Tidewater Virginia (yes, there's another one of my biases--even having come from a southern Virginia town, or perhaps specifically because of the experience of that upbringing, I tend to assume pretty much all Virginians outside of Arlington and Alexandria are conservative, religiously fundamental, bigoted and intentionally and proudly ignorant) who moreover had been born in Texas. Not only was he smart, funny and thoughtful, he was devilishly handsome to boot, yet at the same time sweetly shy and seemingly unaware of his good looks.

After a delicious breakfast the next morning (Jeff and I stayed over with our friends who had hosted the party), we started back to Arlington around 11, arriving just in time to drop our things off at home, relieve ourselves, and get back in the car and drive to the Metro, where we took the train downtown to U Street to see the matinee performance of the Washington Gay Men's Chorus's holiday concert, "Men in Tights: A Pink Nutcracker." The first half of the concert was a fairly typical selection of seasonal choral works, while the second was a sometimes almost hysterically funny all-male rendition of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite, complete with swans; Chinese acrobats; Russian soldiers; a gay love story courtesy of gay matchmaking Uncle Drosselmeyer between the protagonist--here known as Clarence rather than Clara--and his prince in pink tights, including several pas de deux; and an unforgettable, massive Sugarplum Fairy.

We had a wonderful weekend, but between the three activities, all the driving, and the mild overindulgence in spirits Saturday evening, a very exhausting one as well. After the concert yesterday afternoon we had dinner at California Pizza Kitchen on the way home, and then pretty much collapsed on the futon in front of the TV, heading to bed very early last night. Even today and tonight, I still feel worn out. But satisfied.