H-O-M-E. Where life is sweet, and the bathrooms are private, and the laundry’s in the back room.

I came home to find a copy of one of my most-anticipated reads of the year, Liz Hand‘s Generation Loss — sadly, it’s going to have to wait a couple of weeks, until my first packet of work is turned in. In the meantime, here’s the wondrous opening paragraph:

There’s always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer — someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great — she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don’t see it coming, if you blink or you’re drunk or just looking the other way — well, everything changes anyway, it’s not like things would have been different.

Most of you who know me well know that I like to diagnose illnesses in myself (and others). Usually, I’m right, although occasionally I’m wrong.

I’d been thinking what I have is a garden variety corona- or rhinovirus — and it may well be — but what it’s really reminding me of? Is mycoplasma, aka walking pneumonia, which I had a few years ago (Wiscon!), and was very similar. I felt crappy and tired, but not at a high enough level to stop all activities and thought. And, more importantly, I had a cough — I never have a cough, in fact, that’s the only other time I can remember having a cough in recent history. Oh, and this is the perfect setting for acquiring such a beast; it’s way common in younger children in close school settings.

So, I’ve made an appointment on Friday for when I get home and we’ll see if I’m right. (If I am, that would be nice, because it won’t get much worse than this before then and a course of antibiotics will kick it.) Luckily, the heavy lifting here is done, now on to packing, and the remaining lectures and paperwork.