So, after a solid 30 days’ posting, I decided to take a few days off. Did you miss me?

Of course you did.

I’d say that the highlight of my weekend was the trip on the Mt. Hood Railroad, complete with “murder mystery.” Kyla and I joined The Roomie and His Girlfriend at the company holiday dinner party, way out in the frozen and windy Columbia River Gorge. We drank (cocoa and Martinelli’s for me) and ate (prime rib… very, very good prime rib) and were entertained by the swaying motion of the train as it crawled ever-so-slowly up the hill and back again, as well as by the amateur theatre troupe hired to amuse and mindboggle the passengers. If I’d been paying the least bit of attention, I’d have guessed “whodunnit.” Alas, I didn’t really care, as I was having more fun keeping company with friends and coworkers. We all had a pretty good time; it was deucedly cold, though!

On Sunday, we went shopping and quickly spent my Christmas bonus (note: about twice as big of one as I ever received from my former employers!) on about 1/3 practical stuff (clothing), 1/3 toys for me, and 1/3… well, you’ll find out in a few weeks. Neener.

Today was just another normal day at the office for me, and if I’m lucky the week will follow suit…

Our month-long nightmare of daily, banal posts from Yours Truly is almost at an end.

What did I do today? I slept, mostly, and then read a book. I didn’t even eat until about 6pm. I suppose the good news is that I’m feeling marginally better, though still tired and feverish.

Yay?

It just figures, doesn’t it? No good deed goes unpunished, and my punishment (for spending two hours yesterday morning preventing people from using an ATM that eats cards) is that my cold has become ten times worse than the ever-so-mild nuisance that it was for most of the past week.

Unfortunately, The Roomie and The Girlfriend both seem to have caught my little bug. Argh.

So two of the three of us are home sick today, and the third isn’t doing so hot. Please, wish our household some “get well” mojo in general, ’cause right now we’re all fairly miserable.

(I apologize to my NaBloPoMo readership for the fact that, due to circumstances entirely beyond my control, this month’s posting has consisted largely of statements upon my health. I’m not normally quite this banal, honest!)

Perhaps, if I catalog the sequence of events, it won’t look quite so bad.

• In my mad dash to get out the door so I could catch the bus to work this morning, I forgot my phone.
• The bus, which came a little bit late, got me downtown to SW Morrison just in time to watch the Blue Line MAX leave.
• Since I had 15 minutes to kill before the next Blue Line train, I decided to put some cash in my empty wallet and maybe even buy a cup of cocoa. Hey, the WaMu branch was only a block or so away. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
• Immediately after I inserted my debit card, the automatic teller machine displayed an oh-so-friendly error message, something along the lines of “Oops, there’s been some kind of problem. Support has been alerted, and soon everything will be sunshine and roses. Tee hee!”
• This would’ve been bearable, since the downtown WaMu branch has two outdoor ATMs, but for the fact that the ATM I selected chose not to return my card.
• I checked the business hours on the door: the branch opened at 9 o’clock. I checked the clock overhead: the time was 7 o’clock, sharp.
• Several facts collided in my mind. These included such tidbits as, “I have no phone,” “I can’t call work,” “I can’t call WaMu,” “I have no cash,” “I have no debit card,” “Without said card I’m totally screwed,” “It’s awfully damned cold out here,” “If I want my card back I’ll have to wait for two hours in the cold,” “I haven’t eaten yet,” and “These guys from Knez Building Supplies must be having a jolly good snicker at my expense.”
• For two hours I warned would-be automated banking customers away from The Bad Machine That Eats Cards. I also watched seagulls bullying pigeons around, and I watched the guys from Knez unload drywall onto a small cart and lower it on the lift to… somewhere below WaMu, I suppose. I heard one homeless woman berate another homeless woman at full volume, with exquisitely uncreative language. I watched the crane above the Meier & Frank Macy’s building swing ’round and ’round, but never did the operator lower the hook to hoist any material. This disappointed me greatly.
• At 9:00, a cold and sore (I was expecting my feet to hurt, but after an hour my knees were killing me) and tired and hungry Yours Truly entered the bank branch and informed the first available (I waited politely, thank you) employee of what had taken place two hours earlier. Oddly enough, the woman behind me in line had experienced the same thing… at six o’clock, a full hour before my card was taken. Aha! I reveled in my Good Deed Vigil, as the line in the bank lobby would’ve been considerably longer had I chosen to leave for those two hours.
• My card returned (and tested, in the other machine), I hurried to the westbound MAX station, only two find that two of the three ticket validators were out of order. Third time’s the charm, yes? That’s right, folks, it took two all-zone Tri-Met tickets to get to work this morning.
• Once off the train at the Hillsboro Airport station, I hurried (as best I could, given how worn out I felt) to the office. At first the skies were clear, but then I felt moisture. Then I saw moisture. White, fluffy moisture. By the time I made it to the office door, I sported a nice light dusting of snow.
• I regaled my coworkers (who were, to be sure, quite concerned since I was more than two hours late and hadn’t answered or returned any calls) with the tale of my morning. I knocked back the lukewarm cocoa (hey, I’m not complaining!) that The Roomie had provided (back when I was expected “any time now”) and settled into my workday.

Hmm. Well, it could’ve been worse, and all’s well that ends well, right?

As of now, I’m caught up on the new Kanon series and with my chosen fansub group’s release of The Third. The former involved watching two episodes, the latter, eight. Yes, that’s ten episodes of anime over the course of the day, and it’s all subtitled.

I also got a load of bedding and towels through the laundry process, so it’s not as though I haven’t accomplished anything all day. Oddly enough, what I haven’t done so far today is play any games. This will probably be remedied some time in the next few hours, however.

Here’s hoping some of you out there are enjoying your Sunday at least as much as I’m enjoying mine.