Abbie's Real Life Blog

Ugh, I’m recovering from a cold just now.  It was the fun kind that zaps a whole weekend.  I had to cancel a couple of plans- dinner with my International Center friend, lunch for my grandmother’s 80th birthday- and just sit on the couch with a box of Kleenex.

I was disappointed to miss out on the plans.  I almost didn’t cancel on my friend, but after a trip to the dog park that sucked out all of my energy, I had to face the fact that I was really, truly sick, and it would be very rude to show up for a home-cooked meal while propped up on DayQuil.

On the plus side, though, I got through two epic sagas on the AFI list, Dr. Zhivago and Giant.  Each of those was 200 minutes or more, so I’m not kidding about spending the whole weekend on the couch.  I thought both movies were pretty good.  I’ve never been one for Rock Hudson or Elizabeth Taylor, but Giant was pretty interesting, the set dressing didn’t overwhelm me, and the subplot about racial tolerance took me by surprise.  I was already pretty familiar with the basic plot of Dr. Zhivago, but I don’t know all that much about the Russian Revolution, and I’m kind of endlessly fascinated with the general size of the country of Russia.  It is really an enormous country.  So anyway.

Then I watched the last seven episodes of the ten episode miniseries Band of Brothers, which I had borrowed from my brother.  I generally feel that if HBO makes it, I’ll probably like it (with the exception of a lot of comedy shows, though).  And Band of Brothers was certainly excellent.  I really enjoyed it.  I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of World War II movies (Patton, for instance) lately for some reason, so I took advantage of Wikipedia to look up more information.  Also, the cast was pretty stellar.  And a person could write a term paper comparing and contrasting it with Generation Kill.

I stayed home yesterday but was feeling well enough to do a lot of laundry and sit at the computer for awhile, though I coughed and choked my way through the day.  I finally hit the point where I have to do some organizing of my photo backups, because people have asked for some stuff from the old days (i.e., more than six months old).  So I spent a big part of the afternoon copying DVD backups to an external harddrive.  I swear, there are just no good backup solutions.  For the moment, I’m going to continue making DVD backups of everything, but copy stuff to external harddrives so I can work on them.  But it’s not a great solution.  But I have seen some old stuff that I’d like to revisit, now that I have better PhotoShop skills.

To add insult to my illness, it’s been gorgeous here while I’ve been sick.  I opened the windows on Saturday while I was lying around, just to let the animals get some fresh air.  Today the high is in the upper sixties.  I get to wear my ballet flats again, for the moment.  I bought several pairs at the end of last summer, not quite putting it together that they would be totally impractical between November and late March, leaving me with about one or two pairs of dressy shoes that did work.  I didn’t buy any new shoes all winter, either.  I don’t know what’s up with that.  I just keep looking longingly at my ballet flats and then I put on the loafers again.

Still, even though it’s pretty warm today, I’m still wearing a jacket.  Not so with the rest of Columbia, it seems.  So many people were out on Friday night in shorts and tank tops, as though it were eighty-five degrees in July rather than just sixty-five in February.  I’m sure they were uncomfortable later in the evening.  Sixty-five feels very warm in February, but in July we’d put on blue jeans.

Being at home and feeling sick makes it hard to get back on track at work.  I was eating lunch earlier and earlier the past couple of days, even as early as 11:00 am.  Today I was watching the clock between 11:00 am and 11:30 am, which is when I usually take lunch.  And now I’m wishing I had some ginger ale or Sprite or something, even though I stopped drinking soda at work many months ago.  But I was drinking it at home, you know?