still under the weather

I finally went back to work on Friday the 27th. I spent the day doing not much more than cleaning up all the detritus that had accumulated in my absence. With all that, I got an avuncular lecture from my administrator that I was working too hard (he was concerned about my checking my work email while I was out sick).

I'm on my ninth day of a ten-day regimen of antibiotics. Usually, by this time I'm so well recuperated that I have to remind myself to take the last few doses, but I'm still coughing up gloop. I'm a little worried that I'll still be ailing after the antibiotic regimen ends, and the bugs will regroup and attack anew, this time fortified, as their weaker numbers will have been killed off. I'm sure I'm being idiotic.

What I DON'T think I'm being idiotic about is the realization that these lung things might be what finally takes me to visit Charon and cross the Styx. For decades, I got every respiratory ailment that came around, and when I was sick, I was SICK. I had recurring bronchitis (which is what this is), and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned into pneumonia during one of these visits. (But everybody dies, and there are worse ways to go.)

I did feel well enough today to get on the Krakow Monster and take it out for ten miles. While my friends have been most eager to invite my on group rides, I'm sure I'm not ready. I'm blaming illness and headwinds (and the heavy Krakow Monster), but I did the five miles out at 12.8mph, and got it up to a smoking 14.7mph on the ride back. It's gonna be a while before I'm up to Hill Slug or Insane Bike Posse distances and paces.

There was one bright spot. The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I went to see the McCarter Theater presentation of the Bedlam Theater Company production of Shaw's St Joan. Four actors did the whole thing, and it rocked. I was in tears several times throughout. After, we went to Teresa's for dinner. Great date, and TEW and I need more of them (great dates, that is).

Anyway, thanks for checking in. I'm going to go shower now.

Edit: The thing I didn't tell you about, but which is hanging heavy over me, is that I just heard today that another priest, also a classmate at the seminary to which I went for college, has been removed from the priesthood for perpetrating sexual abuse. In college, he and I were friends, although I later discovered he had turned into kind of a jerk. I've alluded to classmates who'd done this and been defrocked before in this blog, but I never wrote about how it messes me up. We were going to set the world on fire.

I guess some of us did.