sick and tired

I was feeling pretty droopy last night and came to bed around 10:45 ready to go to sleep. Kate, however, was deep in the last 20 pages of “A Breath of Snow and Ashes ", and stayed up to finish it, re-reading the last couple of pages several times sitting on the edge of the bed even after brushing her teeth, just to make sure she was understanding the ending correctly. She’s been anticipating this book’s release for months by re-reading the previous five in the series, and her fixation on getting it and reading it made me smile, thinking of my own past fixations (various books, cuisines, videogames), each of which has been The Thing in my life for several weeks or months before slowly and organically fading back into being A Thing. Funny to see this process from the outside.

Woke up with Kate’s alarm this morning, half my sinuses blocked up and that particular achey hot/cold feeling that says my body’s fighting something. Groaned and rolled back over to sleep until 10-ish (which is bizarrely late for me, who can’t sleep past 8 on a normal day no matter how late I stay up), and then took the day to read more of The Corner before going to a late lunch with John and Mike and delivering a birthday cake to Kate at the hospital. (Thanks to Columbus Day, the co-op didn’t have any of the Joes’ chocolate fudge cakes Kate had been drooling over earlier in the week, so we brought her a Joes’ vanilla cookies-and-cream cake and a container of bittersweet chocolate sauce, instead.)

Made a kind of asian-y chicken soup for dinner with John’s chicken stock and some noodles and broccolini and shiitake mushrooms. Tasty, especially with enough rooster sauce in it to start clearing the sinuses a little.

I’ve perked up a little, though, because my new audio recorder showed up today! I ordered it literally two and a half months ago, and M-Audio’s been delaying and delaying the release… but now it’s here and charging, upstairs. Tomorrow I’ll get to find out if all the anticipation’s been worth it. (I bought a minidisc recorder two years ago, for doing field recordings, but the battery life’s been abysmal. Worse, there’s no way to get recordings off the MD player except by playing them back in realtime – the sound is already on the minidisc in a digital format, but Sony refuses to let you have it digitally, lest one PIRATE some MARIAH CAREY or something. The Microtrack plugs into the USB port on a computer and you just drag and drop the sound files. Easy.)

I’m stoked, but I’m also yawning these giant, slow, involuntary yawns, so I’ll just have to play with it tomorrow.