It’s relatively bog-standard Wednesday evening; a week-and-a-half into my class, and the teams is starting to figure out the basic pattern and rules of engagement, getting along well, doing good work, and developing, at least in our case, weird conspiracy theories about how our grades are determined, and wondering about the oddly ever-present recurring value of 82.5%, arbitrarily applied, and the tenuous relationships between comments and the actual work offered up for evaluation. Or, you know, maybe we’re all just paranoid. Passing, but paranoid.

So of course this is the time during my adventure that I get sick.

This weekend, my lovely wife, in the midst of getting the party organized and doing all the amazing things that she does, was fighting a cold pretty hard. She seems to be mostly over it now, but it took her down pretty hard Saturday evening. We joked a bit that it would hit me mid-week.

We need to stop joking like that.

I started, roughly yesterday after lunch, to feel a bit of a tickle in the throat to go along with the sinus headaches I’ve been dealing for basically the whole summer. I powered through it, did the gym thing, then headed down the road a ways to have dinner with dear friends who moved to this part of the world a year ago, Andrea and Eric (and their wonderful children), who were kind enough, when I mentioned I was going to be around, to offer their hospitality, friendship, and a home-cooked meal while I was here. We had a wonderful time catching up, sharing joys, sorrows, jokes, and Howard the Duck references, and made tentative plans to catch up again before the month is out. It was exactly what I needed last night, at this point in my trip, and I can’t thank them enough.

I really hope I didn’t get any of them sick.

So today, I struggled through; our next major group project took shape nicely, and we’ve started working our strategy for studying for this next exam, the largest of the four we’re to face. I worked through lots of cough drops, then, upon leaving, hit up the store for some laundry supplies and to replenish my food stores; decided to consider my trip around the local big box grocery my workout for the day, and returned to the hotel, ate some food, studied some for the exam on Friday morning, scanned the headlines, and wrote this missive. After I finish this, I expect I’m probably going to settle in with a book (currently Year One: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Collection, written by my con associate John G. Hartness, and endorsed by Whoopi Goldberg!) and knock off early so I’m not down for the count like last time, because now is not the time.