I don’t think I’ve ever in my life gone from “didn’t know I was sick” to “calling in to work” faster than I did Thursday morning.  I literally woke up, turned my head, and reached for my phone to pull up the SubFinder app.  I don’t know who broke into my skull during the night and replaced my brain with a billion shards of broken glass, but as soon as I turned said head all those shards of glass went straight into my eyes and my forehead.  The decision was instantaneous.  

I think I stayed awake long enough to text my wife, who wasn’t in the room, that I wasn’t going to work and not to wake me back up, and that was it: I was out, completely, until after 1:00 PM, and spent most of the rest of the day bouncing back and forth between “napping” and “wishing I was dead.”  I got up for a few minutes when Bek came home for lunch, ate something, and promptly lost it about 15 minutes later.  Yesterday was marginally better, enough so that by the time evening rolled around I went out for my wife’s birthday dinner with my family but not better enough that I went to work.  Today I’d call myself 85% human.  I’ll take it.

Outside, we’re having another blizzard.  It’s not going to accumulate much, I don’t think, but it’s blowy as hell and there have been several times already today where I’ve looked out my front door and been unable to see the foot of my driveway.  A neighboring county has basically ordered everyone but emergency vehicles off the road, although ours isn’t that bad yet.  So cabin fever gets to be something that I can look forward to for the rest of the weekend.

Let’s see.  What else is going on?

• I am trying very hard not to rant about the upcoming ISTEP test.  Very very hard.  Two main reasons: one, it’s mostly inside baseball to anyone who doesn’t live in Indiana, and two, it’s too bound up in what is rapidly becoming life-crisis levels of disaffection with my career.  Once I get started, I’m not going to be able to stop, and I’m just not willing to go there yet.
• I still owe those of you who may be interested a post on Amazon ads.  I don’t know that I had officially stopped the advertising campaign the last time I’d mentioned it, but I have by now, and describing the program as “completely useless” is the literal, non-hyperbolic, using-literal-to-mean-literal-and-not-figurative truth.
• I am in possession of the final cover, text and all, for THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 2: THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE.  I am hugely excited about it and I am doing my best to sit on it for a while longer because the book doesn’t launch until April 28th and I’m trying to save some surprises for closer to release date.  My alphas are supposed to be getting back to me in about two weeks; I’ve heard good rumblings from a few of them but nothing official yet.
• The Internet has, in general, been destroying my will to live lately.  I’m working on that, though.  Partially by about tripling my daily dose of Vitamin D.  Hopefully you can’t actually overdose on that shit.
• I did my taxes, or at least mostly did my taxes.  Bad news: I owe thousands of dollars.  Good news: I knew I was going to owe thousands of dollars (getting a $10K grant will do that) and I actually owe less than the number of thousands of dollars that I’d set aside to pay for taxes, so at the moment it’s sorta like getting a refund, and that’s before I really start looking carefully at deductions.  So, yay for financial planning, I guess?

Whassupwitchu this weekend?