better and ready to shop

I feel much better today – my throat is still a bit sore and I woke up with stuffy sinuses, but I don’t have that general feeling like crap thing going on. Rudder’s cough is still hanging on and his lungs are still congested, poor thing – maybe I don’t have what he’s had. It seems like I fairly often feel like I’m coming down with a cold right before my period, then it goes away in a day or two. No idea why, and it’s not something I’ve heard from other women; maybe just something about mucous membranes inflaming or retaining fluid? This could be that, but I’ve never felt as bad as I did yesterday from that.

Rudder has to stay until 7 tonight for a late meeting. (Poor thing again.) Unfortunately he didn’t know soon enough to tell me in advance, or I could have brought a bathing suit – there’s a very nice pool and a minimal fitness center in our building. So since I don’t particularly want to stay at work that late, one of us has to take a taxi, and since I’m not fond of driving and he doesn’t mind it, I will. Since he’s working late anyway, as long as I’m still feeling OK at the end of the day, I might just head to Page One, the bookstore in Taipei 101, instad of going home. The bookstore is one place I didn’t get to shop in last weekend, and I’ve got that panicky feeling I’m running out of things to read.

I probably would have at least books to reread soon enough anyway; when our airfreight bags were delivered yesterday (yay! more clothes! more shoes! wireless hub!) the deliverers told us our boxes would be here in only another week or two. This has a couple of possible downsides among the genera wonderfulness of having all our stuff here: for one thing it means Rudder needs to arrange a place to store his boat, sooner than we’d expected. For another, it means that our ergs will be here in time for Thanksgiving Day, so we have no excuse not to do the Concept II Holiday Challenge. (We will be in the Netherlands for about half of it, but there is an erg in the hotel and of course there are the ones at the boathouse there.)

I’ve found a useful site for Mandarin phrases. You never know when you might need to be able to say “My hovercraft is full of eels”. (Wö de qìdiànchuán chōngmän le shànyú. The symbols over some characters denote tones – the two dots over an o and an a should be a little u shape but I couldn’t do that character.)