The Rest of the Weekend and Bonus Excitement

My poor old, old, old laptop shut down just as we were getting ready to leave The Cup. The screen suddenly went dark and a dire sentence: “Core temperature has reached 27° C: shutting down” appeared. Then Linux shut itself down. That seemed like a good time to pack up and head over to Old Chicago to watch our football games. We bumped into an ex-co-worker of mine, Alden, at the coffee shop, so I wasn’t relying on the computer for fun. It’s great that we’ve lived in and near Boulder long enough (seven years!) to occasionally bump into someone we know. Alden has two young twin daughters, so she caught us up on them—and how hard it is to find something fun for them to do inside on a weekend morning! As you may recall, it’s been freezing. Yesterday’s high was eighteen degrees, and I was cold ALL DAY. The Cup was freezing (although my computer still managed to overheat). Then we went to watch two miserable football games at Old Chicago, where I had to wear gloves and a hat inside. (The Browns and Steelers both lost.) Then off to the climbing gym, where I finally warmed up a little bit while I was climbing. Then to the bookstore to spend a couple of interim hours before heading over to Jen’s place for dinner. I took a short nap with my head on the table, my poor frigid body wrapped in my hat, coat, and gloves, plus Dave’s coat. Jen cooked us a delicious dinner of spinach salad with shaved almonds and craisins, rosemary biscuits, and Wisconsin soup (if I’m remembering correctly), a terrific creamed soup with plenty of fresh vegetables. For dessert we had a Frazer family Christmas tradition—bourbon balls. Yum! Elijah went over with us and we played a game called Ticket to Ride after dinner. Dave and I had never played it before, but it was fun. And long. We didn’t get home until about 11:30 p.m., by which time I was so utterly frozen I thought I’d never had a more uncomfortable day.

Then I woke up throwing up, and spent the night dashing off to the bathroom. I seem to have a twenty-four-hour flu, or some such bug. Yuck. I stayed home sick from work today (Monday), and I’ve mostly been sleeping. Dave has been extremely kind—he built me a lovely fire and cooked me some chicken soup noodle for lunch. I feel kind of bad—I was supposed to be working, and he’s taking the whole week off. We were going to meet for a rare treat today—lunch together! Well, we did get to have lunch together anyway, although I look like someone who’s spent the day sleeping or in the bathroom. “In sickness and in health,” right?

Two very exciting things have happened in the past few days. Dave learned that his Christmas bonus from work this year is a Kindle! I’ve been generally longing for a Kindle since they debuted, but I actually got to interact with one at a publishing conference in Portland in November. Since then, I’ve been actively scheming to figure out how to justify such an expensive device to read books, when we have (as Dave constantly laments) hundreds of books at home. But it’s going to be so great for traveling, and the non-glowing screen is so cool and easy to look at, and it holds your place in each book, and you can make notes in the margins, and you can download books in two minutes for $9.99… I can’t wait to get ahold of this thing! Dave sighed when he heard the announcement at work, realizing that his Christmas bonus was actually my Christmas bonus this year. Lucky me!

The other cool thing is that I’m typing this entry using our new TV (our Christmas gift to each other) and a battered old desktop that I got from work a couple of years ago, when they were giving the old ones away. I’m sitting in the comfy living room, typing away on a keyboard on my lap. Yes, we’re terribly spoiled—there’s no reason I couldn’t go upstairs and use the computer up there. But Dave’s a techie and I’m sick, so it’s a true pleasure to play with his new device in the comfort of the living room. It will hopefully turn into Myth TV and allow us to digitally record TV shows we’re going to miss, but that function isn’t working yet. Still very cool.