24 hours behind schedule

Par for the course with this sort of thing.  Visitors over the weekend complicated work schedule.  Can't work such long stints as I used to in the old days, when I would toil maniacally from 8am to 4pm, nap for a couple of hours then work again from 8pm to 3am: it was exactly that sort of work habit that led over many years to huge amounts of insomnia and anxiety, and I've been trying recently not to work after about eight at night unless absolutely unavoidable.  Next three nights it will be unavoidable, I think, though I will have to see how it goes.

• Still have six little slips of paper that need writing/amplifying as real inserts or passages because they were too complicated for me to write easily (an imitation New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about the BoMH game; a cryptic conversation between two characters, overheard by a third; notes that just say "present is a game and game play precipitates an argument that moves forward rel. of Ruth and Anna" and "lipstick/bullet returns in pt. 3" respectively; "old and new signs in Morningside Park," which I remember seeing and which was also noted for me by E. but which I now can't precisely locate in my memory, so that I need to walk back over there and remind myself where they are; one note even more inchoate that I am not sure I will act upon)
• Haven't yet started typing revisions
• But have written up all other new 'bits' from my notecards

Today I will basically be knocked out of action for book work from 10:30am till 7pm (last Clarissa seminar, hasty commenting on assignments I'm hoping to give back in lecture, Austen lecture, office hours, allergy shots at Columbus Circle plus quick meetup with catsitter to hand over keys).  But I have to have a second work session this evening; if I don't get a good chunk of these edits typed in before I go to bed tonight, I'm not going to be happy!

Tomorrow has annoying bits and bobs scheduled (wish it were a complete blank): 8am doctor's appointment to get prescription refills on asthma stuff; noon department meeting; 2-5pm blocked out for meeting on college honors, though I think it won't take that long; 5pm meeting with a student.  I don't teach on Wednesday till 2:40, and it's a shorter day for me than Monday, so I should be able to keep working well into the evening so long as I get my packing done as well.  (Need to bring books for two different pieces I'll be working on while I'm at B.'s, a short piece for Bookforum that will require 4-5 tomes and the Blackwell Companion essay on Austen that means I probably will bring my complete set of Austen World's Classics volumes.) 

Flight Thursday requires departure from home by 5:45am, so though I should be in Cayman by lunchtime, it pretty much knocks that out as a workday given near absence of sleep.  I will prefer to email the final manuscript to my editor before I leave for the airport, but I can do my final pass through the manuscript on Friday if I need to and still be able to get it out before the end of the business day.

The plagues of Job

Just about survived my trip to Baltimore.

I was still really pretty sick the whole time, and the last straw - it was ill-timed to say the least - was that when I woke up on Saturday, my eyes were very gummy in a way that made me start worrying; and by late afternoon (the wedding was at five) it was horrifyingly evident that I had been struck down by one of those plagues that makes you feel a true pariah (I had it once before, which is how I knew what it was): bacterial conjunctivitis!

I was dabbing my left eye (only one eye was really bad) with a tissue during the service, and slapped the sunglasses back on afterward as the situation was wildly escalating with every passing minute. I had to explain to anyone who asked that it was not an affectation but that my eye was truly so disgusting to look upon (teaspoonsful of yellow-green pus streaming out of it, and so grotesquely swollen that I looked as though I had gone eight rounds with the heavyweight champion of Sao Paolo!) that I had to keep it covered; the glasses stop you from rubbing or touching your eyes, too.

(The reception and dinner were held here, in the remarkably beautiful library of the Peabody Institute. The rehearsal dinner the night before was at Da Mimmo's, famous for its veal chops!)

So during the first part of the wedding reception I stepped outside and put in a call to the practice where I see a doctor, and he called in a prescription to my local NY pharmacy (it did not seem to make sense to try and find a Baltimore pharmacy that would be open on a Saturday night, and my timing really was most unfortunate!).

I took an earlier train home than I had planned and made a beeline to the pharmacy; I know from past experience that the antibiotic eye-drops are basically a miracle cure. But when I got there around 1, they had no record of the prescription having been called in, and I proceeded to spend an extremely frustrating hour and a half calling the medical answering service again and again until I finally got an answer back. By this time I had given up and gone home; the doc said he'd tried many times to get through to the pharmacy, but not been able to until just then (3pm Sunday by this point, almost 24 hours after I had first talked to him). So I went back over there, but they only had one of the two kinds of eyedrops and I had to go to another Rite Aid pharmacy to get the more important of the two! By this time it was almost four o'clock...

It was a huge relief to put in the first set of drops, I must say...

In fact it is much better than it was last night and this morning already; I took some Benadryl before I got on the train, and it brought down some of the swelling. Not so leaky now either. But - talk about disgusting!

I have now been sick for a week, and with no exercise - I would guess it is at least a couple days more before I should even attempt an easy hour on the stationary bike...