Last weekend V was preparing for her company's Sunday holiday party and we were running various errands. V had picked up a hacking cough after recovering from a small cold earlier in the week. She went to the doctor on Sunday morning and was told it was part of the yearly flu, and got some cough syrup with codeine as well as various other prescriptions. However over the course of the day (despite the morale boost of test-driving a Mini Cooper S in Mountain View that afternoon) her condition worsened. She made it through the entire evening's party at the lovely Jack Falstaff in San Francisco, but came home and collapsed, not to be woken for work the next day.

I had a full day at work that Monday, but cut parts of it short to come home and take care of the ailing Veronica. The next day i again returned home in the afternoon to see how she was doing, but this time noticed my sinuses were progressively losing function. I intended to revisit work later in the afternoon but my energy strangely disappeared as soon as i sat on our armchair. By 8pm that night i was screwed ... the flu had found me.

Despite assorted emergencies at work, i was f@$#ed for the week. I spent Wednesday in a semi-haze, nursing a useless nose, the worst sinus headache i've ever had (making me delirious, nauseous, and giving me a migraine-like sensitivity to light), and an inability to sleep. No medications helped, decongestants nor painkillers. Thursday brought a nearly imperceptible improvement, and i resolved to go to the doctor. However apparently Kaiser isn't keen on having every seasonal flu sufferer come in, so i got a return call from a doctor instead, who electronically prescribed me a different type of codeine-laced cough syrup as well as some prescription strength decongestant, which the recovering Veronica kindly picked up for me. Those helped immensely, and i finally slept Thursday night. I ate my first partial meal in three days on Friday evening.

While having the flu undoubtedly blows, you can gather some odd perspectives from it. The first is that i saw many movies, most of them more than once, and several of them things i can't believe i would watch. Such as Sinbad's turn as a secret service agent in First Kid. Egad. I watched Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story no less than three times. Twice for Flight of the Phoenix (not a bad movie, but bearing a truly bizarre mood for a survival epic). On Friday night i relaxed under a blanket with a cup of tea and watched David Mamet's excellent Spartan.

You also manage to watch The Price is Right seemingly every day. And it never fails to make you feel if only a bit better. Maybe that's why housewives always seem to dodge illness. They're always watching TPIR.

While a restful weekend spent relaxing and shedding the few remaining viruses in my body was right up my alley, the impending arrival of Veronica's family for the holidays necessitated a thorough house cleaning. Saturday included six or seven loads of laundry, finally truly finishing the dining room, and various tidying. On Sunday V and i had to run out to do some shopping, but we managed to finish the dining room in actuality, even bringing the table and chairs into their final resting places. I wanted to rake the leaves in our front and back yards, but the weekend's storm continued unabated and prevented me from going outside. Chelsea's league dominance continued with an in-form 2-nil win over Arsenal at Highbury, that kept my immune system fighting. However we drew the to be quite honest best team in Europe, Barcelona, again in the Champions League, so more European challenges await.

Despite piles of work waiting for me at Stanford, i was again prevented from heading over on Monday morning. The cause this time was a clogged drain line in our home plumbing. You see, if your toilet bubbles every time that the washing machine empties, it means you've got a clog somewhere in your main drain line. That means you get to have a plumber come out, remove your toilet, and run a drain snake all the way out to the sewer to clear any blockage. And if your plumber tells you that he can't get a snake past 70 feet in your drain, it means you've got to have him come back with a camera to figure out what the heck is gumming up the works. Well, after you figure out if the snaking that was accomplished had a noticeable effect.

I did make it to work for a few hours, enough to grade final exams and give my last resident lecture that afternoon. I then absconded to pick up a few Christmas presents for my family (they're off to Tahoe on Thursday for a week), before meeting V at SFO to greet Alan, Arlene, Ana, and Ramona.

One of the crappy things about V and i getting sick was that it prevented us on following through with our plans to buy the Mini that V had test driven the Sunday before. However, today we resumed that front and hit the dealer shortly before closing. We learned about their markup policy, but also found we could get a decent deal on the one V had test driven. We reserved it, and hopefully they will sell that demo model to us before the end of the year. I got no end of amusement from the dealer's comments after V's test drive. "This is just for my own information, so i can better figure out your needs ... but ... do you always drive that way?". He was inquiring because V's slow performance on the test drive suggested she wouldn't make full use of the more expensive Cooper S. V laughed it off and said she had been nervous. Sure, Mario Andretti.