matthearn.com

Today’s topic: The Philadelphia Phillies!

Now, I wouldn’t blame you for disappearing. A sizeable chunk of my readers don’t really care about sports, and the rest know me well enough to realize that I know less about sports than I do about Green Party internal politics. For the one person who stayed: I’ll try and make this as painless and interesting as possible, but doing a thumbs-up/thumbs-down kinda dealy:

• Thumbs Down, as every year, to the bullpen. Taking Ryan Madsen (who’s not all that great) out of there gives us a bunch of no-name guys who collectively scare the living bejeebers out of me. We really need our starters to give us 6-7 innings to have a chance to win a game, and if someone struggles (as they always do), we’re done. Our hitters (who get a big wow from me) will probably put up some runs, but this bullpen isn’t going to be holding many leads.
• A big Thumbs Up to the Jim Thome for Aaron Rowand trade. An aging and infirm slugger who would have to split a position with a talented kid who just won NL Rookie of the Year; a young center fielder with great range, a strong arm, and who batted .310 just 2 years ago. (If only he swung lefty…) An obvious move, and yet one that I think a lot of general managers would overlook. I think this move alone could win the Phils an extra 5 games.

  Of course, Thome will undoubtedly play 150 games and hit 40 dingers. Color me thrilled.

• A big Thumbs Down to the Ryan Franklin signing. ERA of 5.10 last year, with a record of 8-15 (although he apparently had the worst run support in the league). Obviously, the Phils were falling all over themselves to give this guy 2.6 million bucks. Here’s where you’re thinking, “What, for a 4 year contract? 2.6 million over four years is chump change.” Ha ha! This is for one year! It’s like an April Fool’s prank, except it happened on January 5th.

  Notable quote from the article I linked:

  The Phillies were attracted to Franklin in part by his durability. He has averaged 31 starts and 201 innings over the past three seasons.

  That’s ridiculous. If they wanted, I’d come pitch 40 complete games a year, and I’d do it for about 200 grand. The problem is that my ERA would be like 74. Not 7.4: seventy-four. We’ve given All-Star money to a guy that we’re going to put in the starting rotation to eat up games? This is like giving $3 million to Shane Victorino so he can pinch hit three times a week. No, worse: it’s like giving $3 million to Shane Victorino so he can start in right field and go 0-2 before getting pulled for a defensive replacement, every single game. Except that Victorino never got suspended for steroid use.

  This is the signing that could conceivably knock 5 wins off the Phils’ record, thereby negating the Thome for Rowand trade.

• Thumbs Up to Chase Utley, on whom I continue to have a little man crush. He’s like Pat Burrell, but a little smaller and speedier (though he’s still 6’1″). Plus: he just turned 27, and is entering his fourth year in the majors, his absolute athletic prime. As Bill Simmons will tell you, this is probably the year he makes The Leap.

  (Hopefully he’s not TOO much like Pat Burrell, who hasn’t been able to duplicate his 2002 season [his third in the league], in which he batted .282 and slugged an outstanding .544, only to dip to .209 and .404 the following season. Ouch.)

  I’d like to see the kid hit over .300 this year. Is that too much to ask? I don’t think so.

• Thumbs Down, and it hurts me to say this, to Tom Gordon, girls who love him be darned. The man is 38 years old, and while he’s still got some serious pop in his fastball, I just can’t see how he can keep it up in a closer role all season, let alone for the next three years. (This is sort of a half-hearted thumbs down, since if he CAN keep healthy all season while pitching up to three games a week, I think he could be the team’s most valuable player. Also, considering the rest of the pitching staff is basically crap, we’re going to have to win with what looks like a pretty potent lineup of hitters. This means a lot of scores like 8-3 and 11-6, both winning and losing, so he may not really have to work too much. In short: I don’t know what I’m talking about, and you’re losing IQ points with every word of mine that you read. But that’s pretty normal, really. And if you had a lot of IQ points to start with you wouldn’t be here.)
• Thumbs Up to Ryan Howard, who occasionally gets mentioned in the same breath as David Ortiz, but is entering only his second year. I pee a little when I think about this.
• Thumbs Down to the starting rotation. (Which means I gave thumbs down to every aspect of the pitching squad! This gives me no pleasure.) Jon Lieber is a quality pitcher, but his best years are behind him. Randy Wolf always seems tantalizingly close, but never QUITE as good as we hope, and he had Tommy John surgery and is out until at least July. Rick Shanley, of course, can put his 101-mph fastball and devastating knuckler to good effect…oh wait, that’s only in my video game. (In which, it’s worth noting, Brian Smith is a four-pitch closer with an ERA, over 2 seasons, of about 1.3, and Matt Hearn is an overweight slugger who batted .373 and hit 48 home runs in 2005. And Kyle Andersn (it limits last names to 7 letters, which strikes me as bizarre) stole 35 bases.)

  And I can’t figure out what all the hoopla is about Brett Myers, exactly. Maybe his goatee is magical.

  Anyway, April’s starting rotation: Lieber, Myers, Corey Lidle, Steroid-Boy, and then any one of like 11 possibilities. Hopefully they won’t have the same kind of April they had last year, where they spent the rest of the season playing catch-up and came one game short. I would prefer this did not happen.

So here’s the rundown: lots of hitting, no pitching. My guess: 90-72, finishing 2 games behind the Braves, and losing in the ALDS in 4 games to the White Sox when Jim Thome goes yard like 18 times. Optimism: it’s for people without drinking problems.

We have ants.

Well, in truth, we’ve always had ants, or at least ever since we moved in to the current iteration of Hearndom II. (My parents, for always and forever, shall reside at the original Hearndom.) They appeared our first summer in the new house, then the second spring, and now in the third winter, they have appeared again. (Hence our wintry discontent.) I find it particularly ominous that every year they seem to appear earlier (earlierly? What’s the adverb of choice in this situation) and earlier, so when the first stragglers appeared last week, I immediately placed a call to a local exterminator.

Last year when they popped up I contacted Orkin, and the day I call them again will be the day Beelzebub freezes his tongue to a frosty stalagmite. I went through the appointment scheduler on their website, and was told they’d appear between 10am and noon on such-and-such day. Apparently this confused the local office, who called my house and spoke to my wife while I wasn’t around. The salesgirl that called was very pushy about our need for a long-term plan; all I wanted was for somebody to show up and squirt the obvious trails with goo, and Sarah was unwilling to divert from the original plan without asking me. Apparently telling an Orkin representative that you’d prefer to just try one treatment (which was about $125; a plan involving a monthly visit for 6 months cost something on the order of $500) is stupidity of the same magnitude as freebasing asbestos. The woman on the phone with my wife was incredulous, and simply wouldn’t let it go. In the end, Sarah told her to just schedule us for one visit or forget the whole damn thing. So she did.

Except that I already HAD an appointment. Now I had two, and given the service so far, I fully expected to have the Orkin man appear twice in the same week and demand payment for each visit. So I called the local office and spoke to an elderly fellow who canceled one of the appointments and asked me if I was absolutely sure I wouldn’t prefer to set up a monthly maintenance plan. I hung up the phone.

Of course, the various Orkin representatives were right. Undoubtedly we should’ve gone with a long-term plan, since after a month or so, the ants reappeared, strong as ever. But I’ll be whipped with a garden hose before I’ll suck up my pride and call them back, if only because they probably put a note in a file that says “Unbelievably stupid, won’t order plan service” and I’m not dealing with smug pest control company phone operators.

So I called George Taylor and Son, and spoke to what I assume was the Son, Dan Taylor. He also indicated that what I probably needed to do was sign up for a maintenance plan, but he said there wasn’t really any point in discussing it until he came out and took a look at the problem. I liked him already.

This morning, he appeared, found a few ant trails in the basement, and detailed HIS company’s deal: $125 for this visit, and if I feel I want a longer term solution, I can cough up another $250 for a year’s plan, which gets me two scheduled visits, and if the critters pop up between visits, he’ll come out for free and hose ’em down with Prescription-Strength Super-Raid. Plus, I didn’t need to sign up for the plan right away, I could just call back if I wanted it, and the deal would still be available. Sold, said I. I wrote him a check, he sprayed God-knows-what on all my baseboards and on the trails in the basement, and we bade each other good day.

This is why I like local small businesses. Occasionally, you get a lemon, but most of the time you get a hardworking expert who’s not going to try and screw you, because he knows that word of mouth is his best advertising. With Orkin, sure, I’ll tell my friends and family that they suck, but as a national company, that’s not going to be put any serious dents in their profits, so they just won’t go the extra mile for you. The local guy knows that every happy customer often leads to 5 new customers, and every unhappy customer will tell everybody he knows, which in New Castle County is probably a lot of people. So he works hard, gives you a good deal, shows up when he says he will, is super-friendly, and explains everything carefully in terms that make sense.

(It goes without saying that I’ve never hired a contractor, so I have a sunny perspective on local business. I’m hoping to have my windows replaced in the next few years, which I’m told will end in misery, tragedy, and death. Although, maybe I shouldn’t listen contractor-related rumors from folks who have hired “Capulet and Montague, General Contracting.”)

Now, everybody just calm down. Before you work yourselves up into some kind of acidic lather over the Vice President’s “accident” (Jon Stewart has been basically having a weeklong drooling seizure of joy, and has peed his pants on the air twice), let’s all just take a deep breath, and repeat this mantra: “Sometimes stuff just happens…sometimes stuff just happens…sometimes stuff just happens…”

I’m no defender of this administration. I agree with the overarching policy of killing as many foreigners as possible, although I tend to disapprove of their methods. And if you’d told me that a Republican administration would be rampantly expanding government…well, I’d probably not be terribly surprised. Politicians are politicians, and government is government, and no administration in 80 years has decreased the size of the federal government. All that being said: I can sympathize with the Vice President.

I feel bad for the 78-year-old fellow that Mr. Cheney peppered with #7 bird shot, but from what I’ve been told, he and the Vice President had established a firing line. Mr. Whittington stepped in front of it, for reasons unknown. (Of course, all of this is on the word of the veep and his entourage, so who knows what really happened?) More importantly: I can relate to Mr. Cheney’s side of the story, and thereby hangs a tale.

When I was in high school, I spent a significant number of evenings at Brian Smith‘s house, in the basement, where he had a pool table, and all the broken microwaves and washing machines you could ever want. The pool table served four handy purposes:

1. as a surface on which people could make out with other people,
2. the actual playing of billiards,
3. the playing of pool hockey, which consisted of putting the cue ball on the table and hammering it back and forth with rolls of paper towel until somebody managed to pocket it in an opponent’s corner (a sort of poor man’s air hockey),
4. and a surface on which you could like while shooting Brian’s old Crosman BB-gun at cans set up on a washing machine across the room.

The impromptu shooting range we set up worked nicely, but it had one fatal flaw: the basement steps ended right in the middle of it. Anyone coming down into the basement would walk directly into the line of fire. Normally it wasn’t a major issue, because Brian’s mom had better sense than to interfere with the activities of 3-5 teenaged boys and didn’t do much more than yell down the steps to yell information to Brian (“Anybody want some chips or sodas,” “One of those slutty girls you like is on the phone,” “Please stop shooting at that washing machine, your father swears he’s going to fix it,” etc.). Anyone else that would come down was invariably one of us, and would be aware of any shooting occuring, and would pause at the top of the stairs to yell “PLEASE DON’T SHOOT ME IN THE ARM YOU IDIOT” and wait until the range had been declared clear (usually via “JUST COME DOWN YOU WUSS, IT’S JUST A FREAKIN’ BB”).

One day, I was lying on the pool table, taking careful aim at either a can of soda or Brian’s butt. I took a deep breath, as prescribed by good marksmanship practice, let half of it out, and began slowly squeezing the trigger. Just before the trigger broke, the basement door open, and some individual, unconscious of the mortal danger they were in, began loping down the steps. Brian yelled out “hold it!” just as my trigger finger jerked back and sent a BB downrange at what must have been 200-300 feet per second. Immediately afterwards, the figure atop the staircase bent down, and I realized it was Brian’s father (a man with whom one does not mess). He glared at me with such fire that, even now, 10 years later, I still have no visible eyebrows.

I’m just saying: it’s easier than you think to accidentally shoot another man in the face.

MY BRAIN HURTS!

Just two three notes:

1. If you mildly confused by the above, see here.
2. Obviously, that is my nephew Nathaniel, with his mother. Both are awesome. As is Gabe, who was hiding somewhere.
3. Photo credit goes to my father, who somehow inherited my wife’s skeelz with the lenzez but passed none of it on to me.

So: snow. As I believe Lord Byron put it, “A metric buttload thereof.” Winter has finally arrived, and with a vengeance: we got about a foot, which put the kye-bosh on church yesterday morning. Our neighborhood had actually gotten one pass of the plow when I got up to check the cancellations at 7:30, and when I got up for good at 9 the street was largely clear of snow. My neighbors down the street had a snowblower, and being the kind and intellectual folks that they are, they blew all the snow off their driveway and into the street, where it froze overnight. Thanks, guys! Good job!

The idea of spending several hundred dollars on a snowblower when my driveway is only about 600 square feet makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit, so I went out with Sarah’s old shovel and went to work. The old shovel has an aluminum blade, which suffers from the flaw that after a few scoops, snow sticks to it like burnt cheese to an iron skillet. Every minute or so I had to slam the edge of it against the concrete so that it would pick up more than a shotglass’s worth of snow per scoop. After 20 minutes or so, I had done the sidewalk and the part of the driveway behind the good car, so I called it quits and went inside for a beer. We sat around for a while, deciding whether or not we should work on the nursery (answer: No), and then showered and drove to my parents for some grub.

When I got there, they immediately put me to work shoveling their driveway. My father had already done the bulk of it, but they needed some more snow removed so that they could get the other car out. My father had one of those cool shovels with the funny bend in ’em to keep you from having to bend over so far and hurt your back. Even better, the blade had been coated with some kind of non-stick surface, so I made quick work of their drive. Good times.

Then we drank wine, ate chicken and dumplings (in my case sans boulettes) and went home to mull over the possibility of working on the nursery (we did not). Then: bed.

This morning, I had to sing a funeral (Edward Jefferson, former CEO of Dupont), which was quite lovely. Dr. Jefferson was an expatriate Briton, so we sang “Jerusalem” with the original Wm. Blake text. Also sung: “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place” from Brahms’ Requiem, which we sing at every funeral, but which still tugs at the heart strings.

And now: finish up transposing a couple tunes from “Footloose” so that it can be sung by high school performers who value their vocal cords.

There three important things that you should probably know about me:

1. I am not very bright.
2. I am a perfectionist.
3. I am very lazy.

Numbers 2 and 3 are particularly important, because it explains things like why I live in filth both at work and at home. With a little effort, I could clean, and make things “good enough.” But I want things to be absolutely perfect, which would require a LOT of effort, like mopping and vacuuming and things. This is where #3 comes into play: things that require a lot of effort are NOT things that I’m going to actually be doing. So the little man with OCD that lives inside me is constantly in a state of panic attack, because the large fat man with cirrhosis that actually pushes the buttons is willing to live with a certain amount of panic.

Also related to #2 is the fact that I don’t like when I can’t figure something out. If I see a problem, I want to figure out the solution on my own, and here I am hampered strongly by numbers 1 and 3. Because of #1, I can’t really solve anything beyond the most rudimentary Su Doku puzzles, and because of #3, I don’t want to waste time trying at it when there’s TV that needs watching and beer that needs drinking. So now, Little OCD Man has been set all a-flutter by James Lileks (coincidentally an undersized individual with a propensity for cleaning). You can read the original here in his archives, which I have been slogging through in an effort to really get to know the Man and the Legend, but permit me to quote:

“So did you know the Titanic carried a shipment of condiments?” Peter said, leaning over my cubicle. No introduction, no hello – the set-up of the joke is the introduction, it is the hello.

“Why, no,” I said, adopting a mask of fascination. When I smell a joke coming I instantly adopt the role of the vaudeville straight man, all exaggerated curiosity.

“It had thousands of gallons of mayonnaise,” he said. “It was supposed to be delivered to Mexico.”

“Really.”

“But of course the ship hit the iceberg, and we all know what happened. But to this day in Mexico they remember that event every year, and they call it -“

That’s when I picked up my Harwood State Bank letter opener, which is sharpened to a bright point, and bolted from my chair; I assumed the knife-fighter’s crouch. “No,” I said. “I don’t want you to say it.”

He backed away.

I chased him down the aisle, waving my letter opener.

“I saw that punchline coming from across the Atlantic,” I shouted, and he laughed and turned the corner. I saw him run into someone else and immediately begin a spiel – no doubt telling that hapless victim the joke. I’d broken the unspoken rule, after all. No matter how bad it is, you let the teller drop the punchline. You can groan afterwards, you can berate them, but you let them tell it. For some reason this punchline made me pull a knife.

I hate puns.

I sat here for roughly 3 minutes thinking, “What the hell is the punch-line to this joke?” Unfortunately, #1 took hold, so I came up with nothing. At least, nothing good. The best I could invent with was “The Day La Mayonesa Died,” but that’s about as funny as a myocardial infarction. Someone out there must know the answer, and I beg you, email me or comment or something. Else I will go crazy.

Oh. Wait. If I had merely read down his post a little bit, I’d see where he reveals it. “Cinco de Mayo.” #1 and #3 lead me astray yet again.

Last night I dreamt my wife was in labor. (Normal, after-9-months labor, not labor now, which would be at 6 months and would be beyond worrisome.) Even in the dreams, it took what felt like days, and we never even got to any really painful, drippy parts. Unless you count when (in the dream) my wife fell down trying to put on pants, which I’m sure is rooted in the time, on my birthday, when she threw out her back trying to put on pants.

The really odd thing about this particular dream set was that it recurred many times throughout the night. Normally, if I wake up for some reason, when I go back to sleep, I’ll start dreaming about something else. Only occasionally will I have a repeat dream in the same night, and this dream kept coming back after every brief awakening. (The whole thing was very disorienting; I woke up at 12:52am and went to the bathroom convinced that it was 7:30 am and I had better start breakfast. I was on my way down to the kitchen when I caught view of my wife’s clock out of the corner of my eye. Anyone who has woken up at 5am and realized they still have 90 minutes of sleep to go has the sense, but not the extent, of my exultation.)

This dream even included one of those difficult-to-explain situations in which I was explaining to someone about the dream, as if I was awake, and the other dreams had been dreams-within-dreams. Do you follow? Yeah, me neither.

Anyway, the basic plot, or as much of it as I remember: Sarah and I are on the way to the hospital, with half of my family following behind us. We get inside the building, which is a large atrium-type thing that they would have built in the 70s (think: “Logan’s Run” interiors (bonus: Jenny Agutter)), with plants and wood and stucco. It’s unclear where we need to be, but what appears to be an information desk is near the door, unmanned. My thinking is, in very non-masculine form, “Someone will return to man the desk from whatever menial task they are doing, and we can ask them where, exactly we need to go.” Sarah’s thinking is, in very non-feminine form, “I’m going to go wander off and see if I can find the birthin’ area or sumthin’.” And she walks off to the right. As she does so, a nice young lady appears at the desk, and I ask her where to go to have babies freed from their maternal gulags, and she points in the direction my wife is going, which of course results in Sarah giving me that look that says, “What, you didn’t believe me? You ass. I told you so.” It is worth noting that I have never, ever, not even once in my life, given Sarah this look, despite the fact that I am frequently right, particularly in the fields of computer and automobile operation.

It is eventually revealed to us that we have to go towards some kind of apartment building, in which apparently we will be renting a condo for a few days for the purpose of delivering a child. This small condo includes a delivery room, some kind of dressing area, and a kitchenette. At this point, I woke up and went to the bathroom.

The next part of the dream is not remembered as vividly, although it’s the part in which I’m explaining to someone about the previous dream. “It was weird, man, we were gonna give birth in a condo! Dreams, dude. Cuh-RAY-zee.” At this point, I woke up because, as I recall, a cat farted in my hair.

When I went back to sleep, Sarah and I were in the condo, getting dressed. Apparently her contractions had stopped, so we were getting ready to return home. I remember putting on a belt. My wife was attempting to put on some kind of very stretchy pants, but she nothing on which to sit while doing so, so when she tried to get the second leg in, she fell down on her butt. It occurred to me that a vastly pregnant woman should not be falling down, so I freaked out a bit and ran for the doctor, at which point I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.

I won’t ask you to tell me what all this means (it means my wife is pregnant and I’m a mess), but I would like to report that Jon Stewart’s wife had a baby this weekend, which I didn’t find out until I watched the Daily Show this morning. Are Jon Stewart and I connected through an invisible thread of comedy and pregnancy? I leave that for you to decide.

One of the things that my father taught me when I was a wee lad was: if you have an opportunity to play golf in the rain in February, that’s a an opportunity of which you need to take advantage. Even if you have the flu. (My father also taught me that motor oil ain’t for drinkin’, no matter how good it may smell. He is a prodigious fount of useful tidbits.)

To this end, Brian and I signed up for the 23rd Annual Groundhog Golf Tournament. This festive extravaganza is thrown on the first Saturday of February each year by the New Castle County Sports and Recreation Department, headed by a nice fellow who I believe is named Bob. (Reminder: I do almost no research. If you want to read something that’s factual and well-written, you should click here to read Brian’s professional account.) Every year they get about 40 guys that play at one of two courses: the Delcastle Golf Club, and the Ed “Porky” Oliver Golf Club, which features nudity and drunk truckers.

Just kidding. The drunk truckers prefer to play Delcastle.

Now, normally, a person who is just getting over the flu should always make sure to stay warm and dry, so that they don’t develop Bronchitis or something. I, of course, don’t do anything normally, so I ventured out to the course wearing long johns under a tshirt and a thin parka and jeans. No hat. No gloves. No scarf. My IQ has been rated as high as 163. None of these facts are incongruous, I think. My logic was, if it didn’t rain, the temperatures were going to be in the mid-50s, so I should be fine. If it DID rain, a hat and scarf and gloves would just become saturated with cold water and have to be discarded. This makes sense, I tell you.

Brian was better prepared, with a thick hooded coat and gloves, plus a hat. The rest of our foursome (John Emory and Stan Lyons, who are quoted extensively in Brian’s column) was dressed about as I was, except that they had brought large golf umbrellas, and all I had was a little flimsy black umbrella that I got at Duane Reed in New York for $9.99.

I played about as well as I had expected I would, since I hadn’t been able to get to the driving range that week. Damnable flu! My putting was pretty bad early on, but improved as time went on. I did a pretty decent job of getting a couple long putts close, and a pretty abominable job of missing several 2-footers. Most of my shots did the usual, and inexplicable, “I’m not gonna slice, I’m just gonna come off the club 20 degrees to the right of where you aimed, for no discernible reason.” This is something that I must fix, as it’s only appeared in the last few years and therefore is probably something repairable.

A few highlights: I bombed a 5-iron from the fairway, straight and true, landed it on the green. Don’t remember which hole, of course. And, of course, on a “closest-to-the-pin” competition on the unused 8th hole (the tournament only involved 12 holes), I hit my best shot of the day, an 8-iron right on-line with the pin. Didn’t win the prize, but still a good shot.

In the end, on 12 holes, we shot a 61. This is about what Brian would have shot by himself, I think, so my contribution to the “best ball” format is minimal. We also four-putted a hole and nearly wet ourselves with grief.

I hate golf. Better get out to the range next time it’s warm.

On the minus side: I didn’t do any strong updates this week.

On the plus side: I’m not dead.

Tuesday night, I started feeling a little scratchy, and it got worse and worse such that by Tuesday night I knew I had a full-blown cold. Man, would THAT have been awesome, had it been true.

Wednesday morning, I realized it was something more. I was achy, stuffed-up, dry (it is beyond me how someone can be so dry that his freaking TONGUE is chapped and still have a nose filled with moist mucus), and feverish. Bad times. I called out from work and slept until about 11am, at which time I wandered downstairs to ensure HW (who was home from work so she could finish a paper for a class) that I was still mostly alive. Then I went back to bed and watched TV for a while, and then I had soup, and was starting to feel better, so I went downstairs to attempt to rejoin the land of the living.

I was okay for about 5 hours, but around 6pm I started to feel rather cold. This was odd, as the heat was on, and I had a blanket, along with a sweatshirt and pajama pants. By 8pm I had moved beyond “feverish” into “feverful” and dragged myself up to bed so I could shiver the night away under the blankets. Sarah came home around 9pm, felt my head, and actually said “Ow” as if I had burned her.

At some point, the fever broke. I know this because when the fever came BACK, a few hours later, I had kicked all the covers off the bed. I nearly had a panic attack trying to find them, in the dark, while shaking like a V8 with a bent crank.

Thursday morning I was somewhat better, although 12 hours of sleep while shivering isn’t as restful as one would think. I laid around yesterday, too tired to move, but not sleepy enough to sleep (stay up for 3 days straight and then drink 2 pots of coffee, and you’ll know what I mean). Around 10pm I went to bed, and got up this morning about 7, feeling non-feverish but achy.

To sum up: I hate the flu.

On the plus side, I do have some truly interesting dreams to relate:

Wednesday night’s weird dream: I don’t remember a whole lot, to be honest. I’m pretty sure the dream involved a bunch of muscles that had gotten out of alignment, and I was inside them trying to push them back into their proper forms. In real life, of course, I was kicking the blankets all over the bed, nay, all over the freakin’ room. Seriously, I punked those blankets’ ass something FIERCE. Anyway, when I awoke at 6am in semi-delirium, I sat up in bed for 5 or 6 minutes trying to discern if the muscles were all okay. I actually started feeling things around me to feel if they were “in alignment.” Fever dreams are freakish.

Thursday night’s weird dream: I was at my parents’ house, and I decided it might be fun to cook them a tenderloin (tenderloins were the topic of a recent episode of Good Eats). Rather than using the oven or grill, I decided to use an open fire. And rather than using their fireplace, which would be too small for the job, I decided it would be best to simply stoke an open fire on the carpet in their family room.

So I’m poking and prodding at this thing, and eventually I take the semi-raw meat off to do something with it, I have no idea what, and work some more on the fire to get it going really hot. Then, as I recall, I took a nap. When I awoke (in the dream, not for real):

• The fire was going like crazy. In fact, it was starting to char the table next to it. (Literally right next to it. You’d think I’d have moved it away, but then, you’d think I wouldn’t start a fire in the house. So there.) It was also leaving a big soot mark on the ceiling, and was getting rather near to burning down the house. I think we threw water on it.
• Some kind of freaky creatures that looked like large grey Q-tips were coming in from the back door and going straight at the fire. Thousands, nay, millions of them. Disturbing, to say the least.

Shortly after that, I awoke (for real) and immediately thought, “Shoot, I’d better call Dad and apologize for the fire and the Q-tip worms.” This is why you don’t wake me up and ask me anything important. I am likely to reply “We can’t go to church, are you crazy? The goats are still out there! Did you find my gun?”

Although I might say that anytime, really. Damned goats.