I forgot to update and say that I'm fine.  First I had a scorching depressive episode, though.  I really think my hormones may be out of whack.  Wonder if I should go on the pill, or what?  I guess it's time to go to the gyno, although I'd rather just shove bamboo under my fingernails.

I'm working on an essay right now (for a given value of "working") and Stick the cat is perched on my shoulder like a bony, neurotic parrot.  Occasionally he sticks his freezing, wet nose in my ear, which is shivery and oddly endearing.  He's purring and sounds like a lawnmower, this close.

Does anyone else get oddly cheerful in the face of tremendous overwork?  Sometimes I think I'm at my best on the edge of catastrophe.  There's a weird calm there: all you can do is focus on the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing.

I'm running in place lately and feel sort of pleased about it, although it also means I hardly hold still enough to really notice anything.

Done in the last week:

• A sonnet, a blank verse poem, first drafts of two "regular" poems, two revisions.
• A big swath of grading and two smaller chunks of grading.
• Started another book of poems: Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger: New & Selected Poems.  I'm trying to get more poetry reading done by viewing it less as a sort of vatic experience and more as something that will sometimes be pleasurable and sometimes just be hard but will always be necessary to my life as a writer.  We'll see how this works.
• Cleaned the bathroom.
• Swept the living room floor.
• Replaced some of the things the hurricane killed, like salad dressing, ketchup, and so on.  The little-known casualty of a hurricane is every single condiment in your refrigerator.
• Made a new budget.

Still to be done:

• A villanelle, another form poem, a revision of the manuscript.
• Blog posts for the class I'm TA-ing -- I'm behind on these.
• A paper in a class due in the next two weeks.
• Track down a hard-to-find and expensive book for one of my classes.

Today, by the way, I did not one single thing.  Coming off a three-day work jag where I slept maybe ten hours total over three days, I slept twelve hours, well into the afternoon, and then watched a lot of TV episodes on my laptop in my pajamas, nursing a headache.  Thank heavens.

So I've been sick for, like, five days or something now, the kind of sick where you stay in bed all day and STILL feel exhausted at the end of the day.

That's the downside. The upside is the enforced boredom has made me work on my mansucript, organize email, deal with all kinds of boring teaching crap, catch up on a freelance project, and otherwise do all the work you can do from a computer.

Not too shabby, for a person with the kind of fever where you have crazy dreams that you're remodeling old homes with vampires. (Too many commercials for TrueBlood and too many episodes of Property Virgin, obvs.)

I think I'm probably going to miss tomorrow, because I'm still fevery, achy, and phlegmily disgusting to be around, but I'm starting to feel a little better. Soon I'll be back to my old unproductive ways. Bring on the cable TV, bitches, because I am tired of being in bed. Thank you.

Pssst -- but being virtuous feels sorta good.