Odd considering that I'm sicker than I've been in 2 years, but yesterday I passed my annual physical with good numbers. First the sick part, I got the flu while we were in Stockton and it settled in my chest and I've been coughing and hacking and snorfling for a week. I'm drinking lots of water, boiling more water and breathing the fumes, taking the expectorant pills 3 times a day and the super knock-you-on-your-ass cough syrup at night. Still, I'm not sleeping well or long. I start coughing and can't stop until I get up and breathe steam or pace around or something. Another variation is I cough and it sends a hot knife into my sinus in my head and then I can't sleep from the pain until I get up and breathe steam. The new cough syrup puts me to sleep but it also makes me slightly nauseous all day.

I had used the call back doctor when we first got to Petaluma and he called in some light weight cough syrup but when I saw my doctor on Thursday he gave me the big guns. He also sent me off for the usual blood and fluids tests, pounded, listened, etc. My blood pressure remains good to low, 90 over 50 something, my cholesterol is 98, all the other numbers are good. Yeah, I'm healthy. Argh! I feel like shit!

So, I've been napping during the day and getting up for an hour or so several times a night. Even the dogs are confused. They like the nap in the daytime bit but they also like to sleep straight through the night, I'm exhausting them.

Even with all these distractions, we have been getting a lot done. Mimi's Mac powerbook died while we were in Akumal, well to be more precise, the hard drive died and (shhhhh) I had no backup less than a year old. So, I took it off to the Apple store in Corte Madera and bought an external hard drive, hooked it up right there at the genius bar and they booted it from one of their machines. I got most everything copied off of it and then turned it in to them. They called the next day! and it was done. It has a new hard drive, new operating system and everything else needs to be replaced. During one of my middle of the night ramble and steam sessions, I started moving things and when it wanted to update portions of the operating system I clicked OK without even thinking. Wrong! We got FAPPED!!

Hughes (from now on called the Huge Corporation from Hell or HCH) is the company that we get our satellite internet from and they have a wonderful little tool which enables them to sell high and buy low by not allowing their customers to use very much of their internet thus they can buy very little bandwidth from the expensive satellites and sell that little bit to the starving customers for a whole lot. No one in their right mind would use satellite internet if they had any reasonable alternative, thus all of their customers are starving for bandwidth. They call this nifty program FAP, and in true double speak that stands for Fair Access Policy. The other ingenious part of this policy is that they do not reveal the workings of it so you can't predict when you will get fap'd and you can't predict when the fap'ing will go away. It's truly diabolical. So, for perhaps 24 hours my connection slowed to speeds well below an old 300 baud modem. Do I know how long this continued? Of course not, I am not allowed access to such secret workings, I only know that I was FAP'd, that it took 5 minutes to download one email without pictures and that at some point over 24 hours later the speed picked up a little. By then of course, it seemed quite peppy but in fact it was not back to "normal" speeds and my FAPing was only dwindling, not gone.

As Pavlov proved many years ago, if you don't know when you will get hit and you don't know how bad it will be and you only know it will happen if you actually use the service you are paying for, you start to cut way back on the use in the hopes of avoiding the next electrical shock treatment. Perfect! Now the customers police themselves and don't use even the measly amount they are allotted because the 24+ hours of shock treatment are so horrible. So, I haven't been online for a day or so.

Back to good news... we need to sell the house we own in Petaluma to finance the renovation in Merida. We have the best tenants the world has ever known living there and so we went to see them the other night and offered to sell the house to them if they wanted it. They want it. Yay! That means we only have to agree on a price and get a lawyer to draw it all up. We even agree on a lawyer as many years ago when we were looking for tenants a lawyer friend of ours recommended this couple. So, we are all friends of this lawyer, we all trust her and we agreed to pay her to do the work. All that is up in the air is will she accept this great job.

So, in spite of being sick I've been declared healthy, the house has sold itself and we don't have to go through months of painting and listing and open houses, the Mac has a new brain and all was not lost, and once we see the tax lady we will be free to leave. Of course, it finally warmed up a bit today after a week of rain, cold winds, fog, clouds, and blood sucking insects. Some of you may remember how much I love finding ticks anywhere around me. A few nights ago I found one busy attaching itself to the top of my head. A lot of trauma resulted. Loud voices, tweezers, gagging sounds, flinging of all clothes and bedding... all this was the result. So far, no more have been discovered but no one - including the 4 legged ones who luckily enough have a liquid spread on their necks so the blood sucking creatures don't attach to them - is allowed to venture behind the RV into the green and beautiful field. I want to know if I can have the liquid applied to my neck if I swear never to shower again, it might be worth it.