Not dead, despite rumors to contrary

Y’all may have noticed that I haven’t posted in days. This has been because I’ve been sick as a dog with a cold that just will not quit, and have been ever since the day I came back from Vancouver. Woke up this past Monday with a soreness to my throat, and my first though was “oh shit”. I made it to work okay, but by the end of the day I was quite hoarse. And by Monday evening it was official: I was sick.

I stayed home the rest of the week, coughing up a storm, fumbling for the tissues, and ingesting any number of OTC remedies. On Thursday, I saw one of the other doctors at my usual clinic (since my usual doctor wasn’t in that day), and she said that yep, I had a nasty cold. Never had a temperature of note so we were pretty sure this hasn’t been any form of flu. It’s just been a Martian Death Cold.

I got back enough brain by Friday to work from home, and as of today I’m functional enough to be bored silly, but I’m still snorky, coughy, and prone to needing to curl up under the blankets for random bouts of zzzz’s. I have been absolutely useless for getting any writing done or much of anything else. I’ve been consoling my ailing self by rewatching first season Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and userinfosolarbird and I have also taken the opportunity to get caught up on Caprica, which to our pleasure is continuing to fail to suck. And since I’ve also been useless for continuing my previously planned Laurie King readathon, I’ve punted instead to re-reading the J.D. Robbs–since I’ve started exchanging my paperbacks of those for electronic copies.

I’ll be staggering back to work tomorrow, and if Cliff Mass is correct in his last post, it’ll be just in time for the weather to take a turn for the sucky. Joy. I’m sick all week while it’s warm and sunny, and it gets wet and cold just in time for me to go back to work. I’ll be lucky to shake this damn cough before April.

The cats have been quite happy to curl up beside me while I’m making with the zzzz’s, though. I even got a picture of them. Dara says this is particularly good and that I should post it!

Today in Vancouver

So yeah, Saturday in Vancouver has failed to suck. Made it safely up here to Chez userinfocow, with hardly any wait time at all at the border. And today, we went out on various and sundry shopping sorts of excursions.

userinfocow took userinfosolarbird and userinfospazzkat and me over to the nearby HMV–which proved to be a way more fruitful visit this time around than on the two previous visits, because this time I actually scored an album by La Bottine Souriante! Also picked up one by the Punters, who I’ve been meaning to listen to anyway by way of introducing myself to more Newfoundland music; plus, this album has the magic words “Produced by Alan Doyle” on the back, so I’m figuring that’s a strong recommendation right there. Lastly, got one by the Rankins, since I like their track on Fire in the Kitchen.

Relatedly, userinfocow also gave Dara and me a copy of userinfohsifyppah‘s very first filk CD, Steel Cage Match. Looking forward to listening to this, in no small part because “I Fell Asleep (Reading the Silmarillion)” made me LOL, and also, I want to hear “Livejournal Shanty” too.

And, userinfocow snagged me a couple of loaner copies of La Bottine Souriante albums from the Vancouver Public Library as well. These shall have to stand me until I can acquire actual copies of these albums–which I have now ordered from Amazon, since apparently Amazon’s actually stocked up on La Bottine Souriante a lot since the last time I looked. To wit, bitchin’. Or should that be bitchin-ez moi?

Anyway, aside from all this musical love, we stopped in at Little Sister’s, which is Vancouver’s oldest queer bookstore. Which was kind of neat. I walked out with a novel called Salt Fish Girl which sounded interesting to me and SFnal (it mentions shapechanging and biotechnology), even though it doesn’t call itself a science fiction novel. I told the dude at the counter that I was a bit surprised that they didn’t have Tanya Huff in their (teeny) fantasy section, given that she’s a queer Canadian author and that she has a whole trilogy of books starring a queer boy, set in Vancouver even! He thought that was cool, so who knows, maybe they’ll stock ’em. Also, they had a big black Labrador-lookin’ doggie who reminded me a lot of Sheriff, the doggie who lives along the goat trail.

OH OH OH, also, they had a magazine on the rack there with a cover blurb about an interview with the actress Alex Hedison. Wait a minute, I thought, Hedison? She did look suspiciously familiar, so I thumbed into the zine to check the interview–and yep, that there was the daughter of David Hedison, my very own Captain Crane from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. And she’s not only queer, she’s the former partner of Ellen DeGeneres! That’s some pretty high-profile queer there.

And after that, userinfocow went back to his place while Dara and Paul and I proceeded to hop on the bus and head down to the Asian-heavy community in Richmond, where they have a couple of largish Japanese/Chinese/Asian-friendly shopping mails. That was neat. Quite a bit of flashbacks to Japan there what with the layout of the stores and the sorts of stuff they sold. We snagged a couple of gifts for folks, had tasty lunch and later on tasty yogurt, and eventually staggered back to Chez userinfocow for zzz’s.

We’ll be heading to Steamworks for tasty food in a little bit, and to meet up with userinfogerimaple and possibly also userinfoelfmaid. Which should be a fine closer to a pretty fine day indeed.

Quiet weekend

What with userinfosolarbird being out of town this weekend, I’ve taken it upon myself to have some quiet me time, which I really rather needed. Just getting caught up on my sleep is a win. But so is doing various and sundry small chores and errands that needed doing, such as getting the checkbook caught up, buying reflective red tape to go over the broken lens on our right rear taillight*, picking up some more long and therefore work-appropriate shorts to wear to work as well as some badly needed sports bras, and washing clothes and sheets and towels.

Friday night we had all the Bothell crowd as well as userinfojennygriffee come over for more tabletop gaming, and while that was quite hectic, it was also fun. I continue to be full of Win for little Moira and Lillian, and this time around I also got little William’s attention; the boy thought it was great fun to try to help me play my guitar. He’s shyer than the girls and doesn’t talk nearly as much, so it was pretty neat to see him perk up.

Lily and Moira love going up our stairs and peeking in my bedroom because I have a big bed they can bounce on, and also, we have a cache of stuffed animals in there. But they also love making me (as well as any other convenient grownups) chase them in circles around the main floor of the house. Lily in particular commanded me to “be a dinosaur!”, so I apparently need to get right to work on my T-rex impersonation. ;) Meanwhile, Moira wanted to further investigate our DVD collection, and when she spotted the pink boxes that contain our Cardcaptor Sakura anime episodes, I went ahead and let her watch that figuring that it wouldn’t be too scary for her or Lily. userinfokathrynt tells me that Lily in fact is experimenting with being scared, and likes to identify things as “scary”.

This led to one of the cutest things I’ve heard coming out of a two-year-old mouth lately: “scary toilet paper lady” to describe the antagonist character in the movie I showed them. Hee.

And, Moira insisted that I “protect” her while she was watching the movie, and sat in my lap. Aw. <3 It should also be noted that Lily furthermore kept asking me for "Donkey Riding", and when she spotted the background pic of Great Big Sea on my computer, pointed at it and said "that's a picture of Donkey Riding!" She's still a little shaky on which name goes with the band and which name goes with the song, but she clearly now knows the faces of Great Big Sea when she sees them. Mostly. She also thought Eddie Izzard on my T-shirt was Sean, I think. I put her straight! Yesterday morning Q then IMed me to tell me that Lily told her "we put on shoes and go over to my Anna's house!" I am apparently now Lillian's Anna! Who knew? Unrelatedly, last night while working on checkbook balancing, I re-watched TOS's "Doomsday Machine" episode (some awesome mileage of The Kirk), Master and Commander (which I think is now well and solidly my favorite Russell Crowe movie Ever), and another 4th season episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (which is still bringing the wacky).

* Why the hell can’t I buy just a replacement lens for that taillight, anyway? The light itself is intact, it’s just the outer lower bit of the lens that’s broken. But according to the guys at Schuck’s the assembly is all they have, and they wanted $130 for it. I bought a $5 roll of reflective red headlight repair tape instead and used that. Which should do me for now and hopefully satisfy the next cop that tries to pull me over for having a broken taillight.