I made no trip to Houston last week. Sitting here last Wednesday evening, I felt a slight tickle in my throat, a faint ache in my muscles and joints, and a woolly-headed weariness behind my eyes � signs that I was under assault by the flu. I was not, however, going to let these evil virus critters overcome me and end the pleasure I had felt all week as I anticipated my trip. I outweigh them by two hundred pounds, after all. I could take'em.

A good night�s sleep cleared up the sore throat, and I barely noticed the other aches of the previous night, so after I released my last class on Thursday afternoon, I set out for Houston in the mighty Metro, hoping to make Oklahoma City, where I would rest for the night before finishing the drive to Houston on the next day. But about forty-five minutes later (well short of Oklahoma City) I arrived in Herington, Kansas, just in time to visit the restroom of the local Pizza Hut.

I will hastily draw the curtain on that part of the weekend, except to say that after an extended visit in the Pizza Hut restroom I continued south another twenty miles on my journey before I was attacked again by an intestinal virus, at which point I turned back and headed home to more familiar and congenial porcelain.

I awoke Friday morning feeling no significant improvement in the discomfort, so I called the old folks in Houston and expressed my regrets. They understood (and they were probably wary of being infected themselves), but they urged me to consider visiting�however briefly�on any upcoming long weekend. Their request had an urgency that is unfamiliar to me, but which I suppose I should accustom myself to and which I should (and will) heed.

Friday was a lazy day. The kids were in school and I was home alone, shuffling around the house with an invalid's lazy gait (think Fred Sanford), stopping once in a while to sort some memorabilia from old boxes I had unearthed from storage a long time ago. I've culled some old photos from those boxes, and in the upcoming days I'll post some of them here after I've had a chance to scan them.

I had laid in a good supply of books earlier in the week (juvenile lit�my latest interest, which I'll need to write more about another day). Saturday I spent part of the afternoon outside reading under sunny skies with temperatures in the high 60s, but my supply of movies was exhausted, so my sole trip that day was one to the library, where I dropped off the videos I'd seen and I picked up a new supply.

By Sunday morning, my 'constitution' was nearly normal again. I resumed my daily walk, but I reduced the distance from two miles to one, and I increased the time from fourteen minutes to nearly sixteen. Although my palate craved something more interesting than the bland starches I had eaten all weekend, I remained cautious and stuck with simple fare (as I seem to have in this plodding entry, eh).

Sunday evening, at the end of a warm and sunny weekend, one last ray brightened the weekend when we took possession of two hand-me-down computers picked up cheaply from the local senior center. Both Owen and Taylor now have a computer in their rooms. The computers are old and slow, but they're fine for homework (or for typing a journal entry), and their presence should relieve some of the growing pressure on this old machine.

We've enjoyed several weeks of spring-like weather, but winter returned this week, dropping nine inches of snow on this part of the planet. The words "no school today" echoed throughout the land on Wednesday and Thursday (back to work for me on Thursday), and the aroma of vanilla wafted from the kitchen as Taylor and Owen worked on their recipes for snow ice cream.

Reading: The Shakespeare Stealer, Shakespeare's Scribe (both by Gary Blackwood), and Margaret Peterson Haddix's Among the Hidden with Lois Lowry's The Giver up next � all kid lit.

Watching: Fried Green Tomatoes, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Good Will Hunting, and Bastard out of Carolina