What a difference a weekend can make! Or, rather, what a difference cleared sinuses and an ambient temperature increase of twenty degrees can make! Sunday was a day of near perfect weather. Everyone with half a brain was out in it, and driving down the road it made you smile just to see other folks smiling about it. Winter is over! And, man, two weeks of nighttime sub-50 temps is excruciating in these parts. Seriously. All the suburbs are just finishing up their extolling of a collective, weeks-long, whine.

And I'm feeling better, though not entirely, yet still enough to say so. Mrs. Ditchman has now what I had this time last week, and I suppose I'll have this time next week whatever it is that the person I meet tomorrow has. Let me tell you: there is an economic downturn, but it is nothing in the face of lasting illness. I have been sick since August, with a 48-hour respite every ten days, and I can't focus on World Issues anymore (though, it's probably best that way.) Anyway, let the record show that I had a flu shot, took antibiotics, religiously take a daily multivitamin, never eat fast food, and get regular exercise -and still I'm sick like a CDC lab primate. So I give up. How do I account for the general affliction? Well, it's from the children, obviously. Time-Outs for everyone!

Mrs. Ditchman will tell you that I don't take these things well, either. Pathetic, I know. She is currently congested to the gills and still gets up on Beijing time to nurse the younglings -and that without medication! I admire her. But it's not her fortitude with the sickness I admire, it's that she finds it in herself to put up with my own wimped-out suffering. (God bless her.)

So back to work this week. It's in God's hands and my attitude -what else is there? (I mean, what else is there that has any real bearing on our daily fate?)



~