Meanderings: January 17, 2000

Monday,
January 17, 2000

Phoo. Great big horking gap there, innit?

I am sorry, truly. I've been getting over the Cold/Flu Combo from Hell and coughing up the occasional lung for the past week, and to be perfectly honest I didn't think much of that would interest y'all, especially as a number of you have probably had the same damn thing (or will be catching it Real Soon Now). And, of course, there's no real treatment for this stuff other than 1) lots of liquids and 2) rest, so that's what I've been doing -- I think I drank about five liters of orange juice over the weekend, and I've been napping in a propped-up position on the couch (it's hard to sleep when you keep waking up in coughing fits from the thin flow of phlegm coursing into your lungs -- and isn't THAT a lovely image).

I think that's been the worst part of it all -- the phlegm. I could deal with feeling stoned and achy from the flu, I could deal with sinus pain and sneezing, I could even deal with the fukaktah hot flashes I kept getting. But this damned thin, watery phlegm -- it's too thin to cough up easily, which means I just keep doing it until my airway is cleared, and absolutely nothing seems to stop it from draining out of my sinuses. I've taken Sudafed, Actifed, hung my head over a bowl of hot water laced with Vicks, smeared the stuff on my chest -- zippedy doo dah. The stuff just keeps trickling down my throat. At least there's no bacterial action going on down there, thank Allah -- I am NOT in the mood for pneumonia.

Okay, enough of Melanie's Bodily Processes. Actually, I did do something vaguely interesting over the weekend -- remember, oh, back in July when I was talking about the shared universe story I was writing for alt.culture.fabulous, about the Wondrous Fabu-Friendz? Well, one of the combatants finally got fed up of being held in Leonardo DiCaprio's dastardly clutches and nagged me to finish the story. So I did that early last week -- and then I thought, "Hey, Mickey illustrated a number of the stories on his webpage with little gifs and stuff. Why don't I do something like that?"

So I proceeded to do just that -- turfed the text into HTML, then spent bloody hours on the web searching for appropriate gifs and creating/editing them when necessary (I'm especially proud of the Leo DiCaprio in Darth Vader gear pic -- it's truly a thing of beauty). I'm still finishing up the last few pages, but everything should be up by Wednesday or so.

And yes, I know -- why am I spending time on something like this when I should be working on the book? Look, this was a relatively mindless task, which pretty much matched my state for most of the last week. Writing serious (or even not-so-serious) SF while hopped up on Actifed is not recommended.

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