Flexing my muscle

Somewhere between Monday morning and Monday night, a particularly nasty bug found an opening somewhere, a chink in my armor, and within a matter of hours I went from reasonably healthy to sick.

I can handle colds. They come and go in a pretty predictable fashion. But this, this was something along the line of bad-cold-meets-mono. At least, that's the way it left me feeling last week -- the first week of the semester at the university where I teach. Which is another way of saying it was a long week.

Aside from the cough, the congestion and the feeling of having recently been run over by a piece of heavy equipment, I'm fine and glad to be back to sharing this space with you. Writing, for me, is like a muscle: When I stop using that muscle it grows lazy, flabby. And "tomorrow" becomes too easy to say.

So here's a status report: This last day of January, with its deep blue sky and bitter cold, finds me happy to be getting back into some sort of routine -- at school, at home, with my family, with my writing.

Running out of Kleenex, but happy.