Too Ill to Bother

I've spent the last 9 days feeling too vile to blog. I have some bizaare gastrointestinal flu that has had me lain flat for far too long. I'll write more later. Right now all I have energy for is writing lectures for Monday, which I fully intend to deliver sitting down.

Current reading: James Jones' From Here to Eternity (1951)

The Bucket Has Been Kicked

Tonight the elderly cat finally went to meet his furry maker. Despite the lengthy lead-up to the event, it seemed he was rushed to the vet's tonight with frightening swiftness. We were torn between sorrowful goodbyes and a desperate need to make sure he wasn't in pain a moment longer than he had to be, and our stoic selves won out.

If I don't sob, it's because he had a long life, defied all medical logic, and it's really something of a relief. To be honest, I haven't had a chance to miss him much yet, though I will in the days to come. No one had soft bunny fur like our Bud. Already tonight the DH thought for a second he saw him prowling the kitchen counter. It will be a good long while before we cease to think we see him out of the corners of our eyes. I will be watching with curiosity the behaviour of our bereft cat to see how he responds to P's death. (I'm tempted to call him the Aged P). Boo-Boo isn't the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but he has clung to me inordinately tonight, so I suspect he gets the drift of what has gone on. Whether he will miss his friend more than he will glory in his new role as Alpha Cat For Whom We Pay the Mortgage remains to be seen.

Our P was a good buddy. We will miss him.

Crashed

Friday was the last day of classes before reading week. Because you can never have too many days off when you are in Grade 2 (apparently), and no weekend can be too long, the DD had Friday off. We have Monday off as well, thanks to a new provincial holiday, called by someone with a cruel streak "Family Day". Why do we have a new holiday suddenly in Saskatchewan? Because Alberta does. And if Alberta has it, well, dammit, we're just as big and we can do it too. Why Alberta suddenly has it, I don't know, except to speculate that (A) they have mountains and need extra skiing time or (B) the Yankees have Presidents' Day and, hell, Albertans are merely Americans in disguise anyway. We are flat and un-American, but we hate Alberta and therefore must be like them if at all possible. For those of you who don't believe we can desire to be like those whom we detest, I have only one word: EuroDisney. (Those of you who make your livings probing the minds of oddballs and psychopaths, please feel free to explore all the pathetic possibilities therein.)

But, I mentioned reading week. That's a quaint term we used when I was a university student and too naive (or not in with the cool crowd) to know that we weren't supposed to use our week off for reading. (Meh. For me reading is always a vacation. It probably didn't occur to me to do anything else during my week off. Shoe-shopping hadn't been invented yet.) For the rest of the world, this week is known as:

• Spring Break: For those of us in Canada, when "break" lands smack in the middle of the six-month season known as winter, this misnomer is either humourous or heartbreaking. Spring is too far away in either direction for us to either remember or anticipate it. Hence, the reading. The only way to make the words "spring break" make sense apparently involves getting on a plane to Florida and drinking, puking, and having sex with other drinking and puking people for a week. So I'm told. I don't actually know from firsthand experience because I was ... reading. In a library. Beerless.
  
• Ski Week: Canadians can relate to this. (Except if they live in Saskatchewan.) Snow. Hills. Beer. Crutches.
  
• "Suicide Week": I've heard this term and it makes no sense. Everyone knows Christmas at home with your family is the real time you contemplate suicide. "More cranberry jelly, sweetie-pie honey bunch? Auntie Mildred made it just for you!" "Wow, Auntie Mildred, a Yanni CD -- how did you know that was just what I wanted?"
  
• Midterm Break: The phrase for break week that says nothing. It implies, if anything, that if you managed to make it this far into the semester, you clearly need to lie down. Pfffffffft. If you managed to make it this far into the semester, you probably need to crack open a book. (Whoops -- thus spake my ubercynical professorial self.)

So Friday was D-Day for me -- all the assignments had to be back and the entire day operated with the knowledge that if I made it past 3:30 I could crash. The DH took the child to his office, since it was his turn and I felt increasingly as the day wore on as though a nap was my only possible trajectory. So I told him to keep her there until day's end and I went home and napped after my office hour.

The antibiotics have kicked in, so the nose is OK again. The cough is clearing up too without having amounted to much. So what could my body do to betray me now?

It could manage to give me crushing muscle/gas pains in my back and middle all Friday night that made sleep impossible and have left me wobbling and dizzy for the rest of the weekend. It feels like a combination of non-puking food poisoning and a migraine that's just hanging around without reaching its zenith. The DD and I had the same spinach quiche at my college on Friday, and he tells me he was feeling uncomfortable too, so we are thinking it may be a little food bug now. I personally think it's about my beginning-of-break-need-to-crash: in a nutshell, or a quiche -- whatever -- , stress. So instead of doing all the fun things that might have initiated my week without teaching, I am spending the weekend nursing the bleak and unhappy place that is my intestines.

On the plus side, I finally finished For Whom the Bell Tolls. Reading it felt longer than the actual Spanish Civil War, but I have to admit Ernie pulled off the last 75 pages in truly masterful fashion. After 400 pages of "We will blow this bridge", "The bridge will be blown up", "Puta -- I obscenity in the milk of your bridge blowing" (I'm not making this up. Oy.), to actually get to the blowing up of the bridge was like being shot by the guardia civil after hours of torture -- a blissful release. I even felt a little tearful when we interrupt this message to avoid a spoiler for those who haven't read this book so in the end I'm glad I read it.

It's reading week, after all.

Current Reading: Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1957)

Too Much To Do

Classes stop next week for midterm break, what we used to call "reading week", but which now is referred to as merely a "break", or in more hilly climes "ski week". This means that I have to have everything done by tomorrow morning. Yikes.

To do:
Type up midterm questions.
Finish the last 11 bibliography assignments, which got shelved over the last two nights due to our domestic Celebration of Aging and Wrinkles and the Valentine's Day thing. (I'm not feeling touchy about turning 145, no, not at all. The uncontrollable twitching has almost stopped.)
Keep plugging along with the Steinbeck lectures -- always stay at least 21 minutes ahead of them.
Pick up my new purse (thanks Mum and Dad!) from Roots, which the store ordered in for me.

I dreamt last night we all went to Paris! Maybe this is a subconscious reminder to get my passport application going. It was a great dream, though -- even though I was concerned that I hadn't taken enough photos when I got back. Much of it consisted of shopping, which is not a bad thing -- if you're in Paris. I think the genesis of this dream may have been in a conversation with a work colleague of my husband's who mentioned to me that he and his wife are contemplating a trip to France. She wants to see Paris, but he's seen the City of Lights and wants to do the WWI battlefields. This excited me no end, since it's something I've always wanted to do to, and I commiserated with him -- Paris being a big, dirty city in some respects. Yes, there's the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower, and the atmosphere. But then there's also the poodle poop, the rudeness and the general noisiness of the big city. I can only say this because I've been there already and no longer have the starry-eyed fascination with Europe's cultural capitals I once had. Don't get me wrong -- I'd probably sell my kid to Bolivian revolutionaries for the chance to go again, but I'd likely head up to the battlefields myself after a really great meal or two and a glass of something at Aux Deux Magots. I'm a self-confessed WWI junkie -- I'd take a decent WWI trench over shopping in Paris anyday.

Places I would like to go still (in no particular order):
Australia
New Zealand
Fiji
Samoa
Brazil
Ireland
Scotland (again - permanently, if possible!)
Greece (again, but less lolling on a beach this time, and more archaeological sites)
Malta
Italy (Pompeii and Venice)
Prague
South Africa
France (bits I haven't seen -- Normandy, Brittany, Cannes in full craziness)
Iceland
Sweden
Whitehorse, Yukon
Newfoundland (again - I don't remember it much and I imagine it's changed a little since 1965)
Spain
Switzerland (again -- all I saw last time was Zurich airport and St Margarethe)
Japan
Montana (again - minus the Yellowstone flooding this time)
California
Israel
Jordan (Palmyra - the amazing ruins there)

For someone like me, it's stupid to make a list really, because I love to travel. I'm happy if I get to Montana over the border, really. There's just so much to see, and seeing the world makes my soul happier than almost anything else.

Current music: Paula Cole - "Tiger"

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

I celebrated by discussing the whorehouse in Cannery Row and Taoism in Steinbeck. Woo hoo...
The office staff at the college put little Hershey's Chocolate Cherry Kisses in all our mailboxes. Now I must hunt them down and buy a huge bag because they are completely scrumptious.

Current Music: Chopin's "Scherzo No. 2"

Plodding Through Assignments

The head is still periodically pounding with a sinus headache. It doesn't help that I'm grading fiddly bibliography and citation assignments that demand concentration on details. But I have to plough on because I should have handed them back yesterday. Thirteen more to go from this set, and then another 35 from the other class that I hope to finish to hand back next Friday.

To do today: finish assignments for the morning class and pull tomorrow's Yeats lecture together (it's mostly done -- or well enough I could wing it). No running or exercise on the schedule until Saturday, when I hope to go for a run again -- at last.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is merely OK so far. I'm not a big Hemingway fan, but he seems to inspire either total devotion or hatred in his readers. I read his bullfighting book, Death in the Afternoon, last year and it was interesting but horribly uneven. Hemingway is a self-indulgent writer who needed a good editor to stick a boot up his backside. IMHO.

Weigh-in: 162.
Current music: The 13th Warrior soundtrack - "Eaters of the Dead"

Catching Up

I haven't posted for a few days, so here's the latest in brief:

• Wednesday I took the DD to see Night at the Museum and we had a grand time. Great movie -- lots of laughs.
• Saturday the DH and I got to see The Last King of Scotland. If Forest Whitaker doesn't get the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Idi Amin, he done been robbed. This is a powerful movie, and has some unflinching violence in it, so it's not for the faint of heart. Very impressive.
  
• Elderly cat went to the vet's yesterday. Revised diagnosis number 3: the tumour on his liver is not lymphatic, but will continue to grow and impare his liver function. His kidney function is reduced as well, but because he now has hyperthyroidism, he has more blood circulating in his body and this is good for the kidney. Our vet scratches his head. This was the cat who ought to have been dead a year ago. But he's still hanging in there.
• Still blowing and snorting myself, but it's improving.
  

Current Reading: Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Ugly with a Capital "ugh"

My nose is raw and chapped and red -- and it's not because it's about a million degrees below zero here. It's just been blown about 50 times too often per day. The headcold from hell is hanging in there with a vengeance. I haven't completely lost my voice, so no excuse to stay home from work, though I cut out an hour early today by blowing off my office hour. (It's Friday -- I don't seriously expect anyone was coming to see me anyway...) I've stopped even bothering to put makeup on or my contact lenses in this week -- between the swollen, red eyes, the chapped, red nose and upper lip and a complexion pallid enough to make Dracula jealous, I just don't see the point.

Current music: Colin James & the Little Big Band - "Reet Petite"