Mal du Monde

Margie called me this afternoon about plans for my birthday. I croaked weakly at her. "You sound sick. Are you sick?" she asked me, rather huffily I thought. "You're never sick."

"Well, I'm sick now," I said.

"That's no excuse," Margie remarked unsympathetically. "What do you have, swine flu? You swine."

Could I get some chicken soup with that?

Here are the top ten things you should not do whilst recuperating from swine flu:

10. Pick at the scabs on your slowly-healing heart - this is always highly contraindicated, but especially when you're suffering your own personal pandemic. (Doesn't that sound like a menu offering at Pizza Hut? Granted, a fairly gross one - but we are talking Pizza Hut here.)

9. Go to work. You have to anyway, because if you're out more than three days in a row you have to bring a doctor's note, and I'm not paying $20 to sit around in a waiting room full of people with much worse infections than mine, only to be told to stay home and drink plenty of fluids (NOT vodka) and get some sleep, which I already knew. So if you come to my office, be sure and wear a gas mask. Otherwise, you're going DOWN, pal.

8. Take your kids to visit your ex-mother-in-law in the hospital. She's fine, except she has a cracked vertebra from being hit by a VW bus while trying to retrieve a cardboard garage sale sign from the median near a major intersection. However, 30 minutes into our visit, she got a phone call from her daughter-in-law, who brusquely informed her that she has a staph infection and visitors aren't allowed into her room without gowning up. Now, the nurses hadn't mentioned this, and she does have a (gownless) roommate, who also had a (gownless) visitor while we were there.

Frankly, it was too much for my feeble brain and I just decided our visit had been about long enough anyway; but I'm still scratching my head over that one, or would be, except I'm frightened of getting my hands that close to my face.

7. Be the parent of an equally sick child. I'm sorry, but frankly this is just irresponsible. When you're sick, you really can't afford to be up all night bringing water and comfort to a coughing, feverish infant. So cut it out.

6. Read the weekly wildflower report for the state's recorded information line. Your voice sounds all husky from the sore throat, and you'll only give the traveling public the wrong idea.

5. Permit a cool front to bring a line of thunderstorms across the region where you live, dropping temperatures by 15 degrees and reawakening all the mold, cedar and pollen which thought spring was over and were all ready for a long summer's nap, therefore bringing about the worst allergy attack you've suffered in years. That was a dumb-ass thing to do.

4. Entertain Bill Gates with your karaoke stylings.

3. Go to the roller rink with your best friend. This isn't so bad in and of itself, but you need to go when the place isn't full of preteens, because preteens do not fear death, and therefore aren't nearly as frightened of 75-mph collisions as you are. Feel that funny thing your heart is doing? That's probably not good.

2. Plan the mother of all happy hours for your 40th birthday this coming Friday, itself merely a precursor to a full night of debauchery in Austin and a Memorial Day weekend of alcohol-fueled madness in Corpus. I have friends coming in from at least four different cities for the event. I don't think it'll be a proper party unless at least someone gets arrested, as long as that someone is not me, because the number one thing you should never, ever, ever do whilst H1N1ing your sick little ass into next week?

1. Go to jail!

On the other hand, I have been pretty badly in need of blog fodder lately.

You Can Run, but You Cannot Hide

I'm thinking of repurposing this as a weather and travel blog, and giving up altogether on such unattainable concepts as humor and insight. Today at work, my boss asked me to do some research on one of the San Angelo-area attractions we'll be visiting. So I googled it. First place result? My blog!

Oops.

For the moment, Ike's path is forecast far enough northward to bring him up against a substantial chunk of Florida - aimed smack dab at the northern Everglades, in fact. Sucks to be you, Florida! You get all the violence of a hurricane and droves of storm-tossed alligators, flung this way and that by the wind.

Actually, this could make Fox News' on-the-scene reporting significantly more interesting.

Lately I've wondered if it wouldn't be a better idea to abandon the coast altogether. We don't build on greenbelts because of the flood risks, right? Never mind that it hardly ever happens. But what with climate change and all (thanks a lot, Al Gore, you bastard, for inventing global warming) it seems like living anywhere along the Gulf Coast is roughly equivalent to playing Russian roulette.

Not that moving inland helps you out that much. Go to Oklahoma or Nebraska? You've got your tornadoes. California? Earthquakes. The island paradise of Hawai'i? The pristine, pine-forested beauty of Washington State? Oh sure, I suppose you enjoy being drowned in a river of molten lava. And then you've got your wildfires. The Dakotas won't do because they're extremely cold, though I imagine the biking is fairly easy (if perhaps a bit dull) during the warmer months, assuming they have any. Idaho and Montana are just as bad, only with hills. Michigan has Detroit, and Utah has Mormons. New York City is the subject of way too many disaster movies: sooner or later, one of them has to get it right. Virginia has the Beltway and hillbillies; if that isn't proof that there's no God, I'd like to know what is?

Austin is plagued with Californians and fire ants, so it's got problems of its own. I suppose Colorado is nice.

In PowerPoint clip-art today I came across a photo of a picturesque little village on the Isle of Skye, perched in multicolored, historic prettiness on the shore, with the stone ruins of a castle peeking out of deep woods at the top of the cliff above them, and soft green hills and villages fading off into the distant mist across the water. I want to go there. Think I can get a travel job with ScotDOT?