Pepper of the Earth - The Home Office Record & Mostly Daily Gazette

A week creeps by in this petty pace, and if March is coming in like a lion I’m responding like a groundhog in his sleepy winter prime. The background cough I’ve been nurturing has had me in a plausibly-deniable muzzy grip all week long, and it’s getting tedious.

If you’re going to be sick you might as well be good and sick; this half-moon am-I-or-amn’t-I business is just tiresome. You can’t eat fun stuff or do fun stuff or get anything useful done or gallivant around with any abandon, nor can you fetch up on the bed and moan in self-pity. I’m not about half-measures — I prefer liberty or death, in their smaller-scale equivalents.

On Friday I took the plunge and bought the digital camera I’ve been eyeing shyly across the room for months; I haven’t had the chance to take it dancing in full splendor, but we did go to the burlesque on Friday night, which was the furthest I ventured from home all weekend long. I’ll need to get used to the point-and-pray aspect of it, which requires that a guy carefully set and compose his shot, push the shutter button, and then wait around while the world moves past and the camera eventually takes a picture of where it used to be. In the meantime, though, the first set of shots turned out mostly all right. A few thumbnails are posted above, and the rest of the small gallery is probably safe for work, and after that the battery crapped out. That’s what I get for playing with the setting menus all afternoon and not packing a spare.

In case you’re watching at home, here we got weather. Apparently we also have side effects of weather: Pierre and I are both independently posting about tea. Well, that’s what I get for larking around on Sunday morning to photograph The Gates in the snow, and then thumping around last night taking flash pictures in the nor’easter blizzard.

No idea how they’re going to turn out, but it’s a really fun thing to do. You get looks. “What’s he taking pictures of?” “I dunno. Snow I guess.” “In the dark? With a flash?”

My throat is tickly and my body is poised on that soft hyper-aware edge where you’re probably about to get sick but you aren’t quite there yet. The cough is occasional and has an angry red clawed sound, as if it’s raking old leaves around the larynx. There’s a light misting of sweat — the immune system testing the valves, priming the pumps, preparing to dump antimatter if the system goes off the rails.

Yogi Tea is my prophylaxis of choice, and I’ve been switching off between my favorite winter flavors. I reached for the tea stash after a particularly hacking round, tears in my eyes, and worked the controls (rip, dunk). When my vision cleared a bit the teabag tag was face up, and it reads:

The whole universe is the stage on which your mind dances with your body, guided by your heart.

I love Yogi Tea.

The problem with sneezing is to avoid doing it at the keyboard. Especially with the mouth full of tea.