Disease update

Slept badly again last night - propped myself up so I would be sleeping vertically, but every time I fell asleep I'd slide down the cushions a bit and start coughing again. I finally got off to sleep properly at some point after 3am. Woke up coughing at 8am, and decided to head into work - on the grounds that I might as well make myself useful and it might even make me feel better to be up and about.

Which lasted about 45 minutes before my boss asked me the third time if I wassure I wouldn't rather go home and stop coughing all over the other staff.

I have vicks sinex to stop my nose running (about 50% effective), colvonia to stop me coughing (about 80% effective for about an hour half an hour, but can only take it every four hours) and day nurse to stop me feeling generally bad (works reasonably well).

I really hope I feel better for tomorrow. _Bored_ of sitting at home.

Web Comic

This is adorable. Especially if you find abominable snow men terribly cute.

I'm ill. I'm off work. I need to distract myself.

So expect many teeny posts.

New Batman trailer. Which seems to be largely about The Joker and The Explodey. Which are two things that go well together.

And the perils of Rock Band, where forming your own fake band can lead to all kinds of fake drama:

Best question I've been asked in weeks

27
(meme comes with an ad on it that you may want to strip off before posting)

Cancelled Plans

Not off to see Nightmare Before Christmas tonight. Have spent three hours curled up asleep on the sofa, and am not up to it. Will reschedule after Christmas, if it's still on.

Way Station (no spoilers for anything past page 40, or the back of the book)

Finished re-reading Clifford D Simak's Way Station, a Hugo/Nebula winner from 1963. The plot is clunky in places, with various different crises all coming to a simultaneous head for no particular reason (or at least no reason which is ever explained within the book). However, this doesn't prevent the book being staggeringly good.

Enoch lives alone, in the backwoods of rural America. His neighbours rarely see him, and his only regular contact with the outisde world is the postman who delivers his daily newspapers and groceries. As far as the outside world his life is a perfectly dull routine.

He is 124. A survivor of the American Civil War. And he mans a way station on an interstellar route, welcoming aliens in transit from one star to the next as they stop off for a few hours along the way.

The book is filled with interesting ideas, many of them there purely to move chunks of plot along or to illuminate some aspect of Enoch's character. And it's his character that really matters. This is a mature book, written by a mature writer. It's not concerned with war or excitement, except as things which intrude, unwelcome, into the lives of ordinary people. And it's the inside of Enich's mind that we spend most of the book in. Simak draws us in from the very start, and the choices and thoughts that Enoch faces are ones that are easy to empathise with.

It's a slow book, but short, filled with marvellous writing on lost chances, grief, hope and the importance of shared humanity. I felt oddly touched by it. and I'd recommend it to anyone at all.

(Now going back to the sofa, that having used up my brane for the evening)