Howdy! The smaller room in my house (in Quincy, a 15min walk from the Quincy Center T station and walking distance from the shops and restaurants on Hancock and Washington Streets) is available starting immediately. Here’s the text of the ad I just posted to Craigslist:

( Craigslist ad )

Feel free to disseminate far and wide, either by pointing people at this post or by pointing them at the Craigslist post (although that will expire in a few days).

Happy birthday to the wonderful, smart, gorgeous, spectacularly energetic surrealestate! surrealestate, I am lucky to have you in my life.

All the rest of you, did you know that surrealestate is training for the Boston Marathon? (See “spectacularly energetic” above.) If you like, you can sponsor her at this link.

So, I just discovered that my voicemail has been broken for an indeterminate amount of time (but probably no more than a couple weeks). I was using a free online voicemail service called MessageSling, and I just had somebody tell me that they had left me voicemail, which I never got notified about. So I went to the MessageSling site and tried to log in, and their front page is up, but once you try to log in their SSL server is not. No idea if that’s related or not (maybe they were just doing maintenance when I checked), but anyway, I know that I have missed at least one piece of voicemail recently, so if you left me a message any time between the 10th (the last time I know I successfully got voicemail) and now, I didn’t get it. (Note: I have no idea how typical this experience is; this is the first problem I’ve had with MessageSling since I started using them a couple years ago.)

I’ve switched to Google Voice for my voicemail now, so if you leave me messages in the future I should get them.

(No change to my phone number; it’s still the same one. If you need to be reminded, it’s in this Friends-locked post.)

(1) I am doing much better. I still have occasional coughing fits (and in fact I pulled a muscle with one this morning), but I'm almost all better. I feel better than I've felt in a couple months.

(2) plumtreeblossom has absolutely zero voice and can barely whisper, thanks to so much coughing for so long, and she has a bad sore throat (which I had for a couple days and got over), but other than that she is also doing much better. She's got her energy and her appetite back, the coughing is almost gone, and the fever's been gone for a few days. Yay! It's so good to see her up and about and energetic again!

(3) woodwardiocom has a great post about the many layers of fiction in The Big Broadcast, the show plumtreeblossom and I worked on which had such a spectacular run. I hadn't really thought about it until reading his post, but I think those onion-like layers of fiction within fiction are part of why the whole show felt so rich and satisfying. The Thousand Nights and a Night and parts of the Canterbury Tales have similarly deep nesting of stories, and I think there's something about that particular device that's especially good at sucking you in.

Wow, it’s been an intense few days. The spectacular show I’ve been involved with had performances Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, and Saturday afternoon. It was just spectacular — easily the most ambitious show I’ve ever been involved with. And it was huge amounts of fun.

Except for a day’s work on Friday — during which I passed out during a coughing fit and fell off my chair —, all my other time was spent with my poor sick plumtreeblossom. She says she was sicker than she’d ever been before in her adult life, and I can believe it. She’d have periods of not really being lucid, although she’d also have periods of being completely conscious of all the misery she was in. And she felt utterly terrible about having to miss the performances. (Actually, I was ill enough that if she’d been completely well, I’d have at least considered backing out of the performances because my cough was so bad. But I managed, and since all the coughing was away from the mikes I don’t think it distracted the audience too much.) On top of all this, she heard of an unexpected and tragic death in the family (her niece’s mother, who was still very much a part of her niece’s and her brother’s lives, died at 37 due to an undiagnosed congenital heart defect), so she had that to deal with too. Poor my honeywuzzle.

This was the first time I’d ever done Foley (sound effects), and it was a huge amount of fun. In fact, it was the first time for all four of us out on stage, but plumtreeblossom (Foley captain) had done such a fabulous job of training us and forging us into a team, and Sarah (Foley coordinator) did such a good job of figuring out how to adapt to plumtreeblossom’s absence on-stage, that it all flowed really smoothly.

I wish I’d been able to stay for strike and the cast party, but I wasn’t really feeling well enough for the labour (wouldn’t have wanted a repeat of my fainting experience earlier that day while I was carrying a heavy expensive speaker!) or for a late night of debauchery, and I needed to go see plumtreeblossom, who’d been a little concerned about being alone through the day’s two performances.

I can’t say enough about how wonderful the experience of being in that show was, and how proud I am of the entire group and how lucky I am to be able to do community theater and live radio drama with such a wonderful, talented bunch of people.

As far as our health, plumtreeblossom and I both seem to have turned a corner. Friday evening all my free thoughts were devoted to figuring out how I could get medical attention quickly after the show was over, and whether plumtreeblossom needed to go back to the ER. But Friday night something seemed to shift, and Saturday morning I was feeling not well, but much, much better. And plumtreeblossom was having a rough time on Saturday when she woke up, but after she got some calories in her she was doing a lot better than she’d been in a while. We were actually hopeful for a while that she might make it to the theater to watch the last performance, but she didn’t get better enough for that. But she was definitely better, and today she’s better still. So we’re both still coughing, aching, and exhausted, but I’m pretty sure we’re both over the worst of it and on the road to recovery.

In sickness and in health

But lately, in more sickness than we’d either like.

So a couple months ago (after everybody else in my office had already had it), I got the flu. (Probably the Hamthrax, since it was too early for seasonal flu.) I had it especially bad for a week or so. plumtreeblossom picked it up from me but she got a very very mild version — she was basically inconvenienced for a couple days, but nothing beyond that.

As tends to be the case whenever either of us gets any kind of respiratory infection, we ended up with long lingering coughs. They’ve lasted much longer than normal, though — ordinarily my cough would be dry and occasional by now, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten much better (or worse) over the last three weeks. This stage, though, has hit plumtreeblossom much harder than me all along, and a couple days ago she took a serious turn for the worse.

( plumtreeblossom’s trip to the ER, and some performance stuff. )

I am now on the train on my way briefly back to Quincy to feed and water Chickenfinger and clean her litterbox, and pick up clean clothes (which I will probably have to first cause to be clean). Then back to the theater for opening night. I can’t wait, but I sure wish plumtreeblossom could be with us in person as well as in spirit.

As always, plumtreeblossom, I love you.

PS — Yes, I know I need to see a doctor too. Slightly complicated because I’ll be seeing a new doctor and there’s insurance stuff I have to do first. I’d hoped to squeeze that in yesterday or today, but haven’t managed, and plumtreeblossom’s needs are a lot more urgent than mine.

Happy birthday to eisa, whose friendship I cherish. I hope your day is full of joy and fuzzy dogs.

It’s October 18th. It’s snowing. Granted, it wasn’t snowing all afternoon; there was some freezing rain mixed in there, but now it’s just snowing. Whee! I’m very glad I decided to rent a Zipcar to do my huge grocery shop rather than just taking my little wire cart.

If all of you here weren’t so wonderful, I would seriously consider Hawai‘i.

plumtreeblossom and I have been having a wonderful weekend so far, with a fun PMRP work day painting some big pieces of Foley equipment, good food, a bad movie but with wonderful company, discovering a new neighbourhood near plumtreeblossom’s place, and a fabulous birthday party with an utterly spectacular birthday cake¹, a lovely and charming birthday boy and girl with very good taste in friends, lots of people we knew, lots of new people to meet, and excellent conversation. And now we’re about to run out for a pleasant breakfast. It’s a good weekend, and even the rain is kind of cozy-seeming.

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¹ Flourless death-by-chocolate, topped with a layer of strawberries, a layer of tiramisù, and a layer of hard chocolate. I want to learn to make that. And then I want to become independently wealthy so I can hire people to make it for me and to cart me around in my wheelbarrow. It might have to be a double-wide.

Sorry I missed this yesterday, but happy birthday to zzbottom! I hope it was a fabulous day!