The evil flu bug lay dormant in my body for a few days and then returned last night for a second assault on my sinuses. I headed for bed at about ten with a collection of Blixen's short stories, started to read "A Consolatory Tale" from the Winter's Tales collection, but dozed off halfway through it.

This morning I arose to apparent good health, but I will not be deceived. This flu has sucker-punched me twice now, so I'm not going to overdo it as I might have done yesterday in helping T put up the Christmas lights. Today, after I punch out a few lines here, I'll limit my activity to grading papers, a chore that I've postponed for much of the weekend.

I really don't have much to say today anyway, but I wanted to post the photo of T here on my fridge before I lose track of it � this is as much a scrapbook as it is anything else.

I will mention, however, that after visiting the Karen Blixen Museum site linked above, I am a little disturbed to learn that I was alive for a good chunk of her last years. I know little of her except from her stories and from my viewing of Out of Africa, so I was taken aback when I found that not only did she not look precisely like Meryl Streep, but her dates (1885-1962) overlap mine by more than a few, and make her just a few years older than my grandparents. She seems to belong to a much older world than I know, but in fact our times have overlapped, and this bothers me. I don't know why this should be so, and I don't know where I should go with this thought to make this entry coherent, so I'll end this blather now before I use the word I another time the word I appears here again.

Reading: The number of books I'm not reading grows apace. The flu has impaired my ability to focus (that's my story anyway), so now I've set aside Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose in favor of some short stories by Isak Dinesen.