Be warned at the outset. If you generally think my blogging is trivial, this one is really trivial. Ok, that's out of the way, so I can get started on what was good and what was not so good about my day.
So the day started both good and bad. The bad, I had a headache, I was dehydrated, and I still had a cold. Oh, and I had the stress test so I couldn't eat or drink anything. The good was that I was able to do the whole test without an problem and the doctor told me my heart looked normal. My blood pressure was normal and I hadn't even taken my medication because I couldn't have anything to eat or drink before the test. So, on balance, it balanced out.
After leaving the clinic, I decided I wanted to pretend I was in Italy so I walked over to a neighborhood cafe for Turkish coffee and pain au chocolat. The good was that the atmosphere reminded me of Europe, although not in the morning when the cafes are full of people standing at the bar quickly downing their coffee and eating the pastry from a napkin, all pushed together, the people not the coffee and brioche. Of course it is spring break so there are fewer people around here too. The bad was that neither the coffee nor the pastry was anywhere as good as in my regular spots in Venice and it was more expensive. On the whole, I'm glad I had the experience but I would try somewhere else next time. Ah, the search for the perfect cafe--a good quest to start.
Most of the day was sitting around not feeling great. This is the not really really sick but not really really well syndrome and it sucks. Sometimes you have a lot of sneezing and sometimes just the feeling that you might sneeze. In any case, you have very little desire to get anything done. The good, not much. I spent most of the day on Facebook chasing eggs, and sending plants and other gifts to people. Why medieval gifts just sit around unclaimed when the same people that you send both medieval gifts and plants to take your plants and then send you more plants but don't bother with the medieval things and don't send you medieval things is beyond me. I am more of a medievalist than a gardener. I'm all for saving the rainforests but a Marc Bloch or Brian Tierney or Lynn White wouldn't go amiss. But at the moment I am an egg collector, as I have written about before. So the bad is that I spent an inordinate amount of time collecting eggs. The good is that I have a lot of eggs and even quite a few special eggs. However that raises a question of its own. How special is a special egg if you encounter it 15 or 20 times in one day? Some eggs are so special that I only see them in other people's collections or I get them once and that's it. Others appear over and over.
So one thing that is bad is that the game is an easy way to waste time. The good is that as of now I have moved up to 6th place at UIllinois and I have 3325 eggs including 85 limited edition eggs. At least they didn't cost any actual money. I would have had the computer on any way. I did get a little bit of work done on my presentation. That was good. What was bad was that saving it in PowerPoint only seemed to work and then it turned itself into something totally unusable. So I redid it in Keynote. I haven't been able to figure out why this happens. If I then save the Keynote presentation in PowerPoint, it is fine in PowerPoint. So, this can be classified as inexplicable. I am also having problems finding good illustrations. For this kind of lecture, illustrations are very important. I do have some video but I need illustrations from the sixteenth century. And my outline indicates to me that I have too many points. I need to lessen the complications somehow. All that is bad. But I have made a start. That is good.
My research books, which have nothing to do with the above project arrived. That was good. The Calais ones should be very helpful if I get back to my research on Giles Daubeney, even though one doesn't mention him. The third, on women and reading, will be good if I go back to my projected paper on women and literacy. My only worry there is that I may have bought a book I already have. I really need to finish cataloging my books. The fact that I have not done so is very bad.
Most of the rest of was good. I ate healthy meals but then ate Girl Scout cookies for dessert. Generally between lots of veggies and whole grains, which were good and the pain au chocolat and the Girl Scout cookies, which were not, the food picture was mixed. I am now drinking green tea, so that is good. I have a headache again, which is bad but can be explained by the weather, which has been windy all day and is now finally rainy, which was supposed to happen earlier. I got my bike, which was good and spent less at the bike shop than I expected, which was also good. I couldn't figure out how to get the rear light off, which was bad. But Peter figured it out right away, which was very good since I didn't have to go back to the shop and tell them I was so stupid I couldn't even figure out how to get the light off the bracket.
I went shopping, again a mixed experience. I didn't find anything to buy, which was bad. But I didn't spend any money, which I would say was, on the whole, good although the government would probably say it was bad.
Overall, probably a normal, boring day. Some of it was good and some was bad. But I still have this cold.
No comments:
Post a Comment