I'm more or less recovered from the jet lag of coming home, but it hasn't been an easy week. I got back about 5:30 p.m. last Sunday. Robert came in on Monday and it was a real effort to get myself out to the airport to pick him up. I fear that I wasn't the most enthusiastic companion, as I kept failing to keep myself awake past about 9 at night. Oh, well, we knew it wasn't optimal timing.
On the better timing side, he left on Thursday morning. Not that I wouldn't have liked to have him here longer, but it meant he didn't get caught in the mess that came about from a tiny amount of snow on Friday. Tons of accidents on the roads - including an SUV crashing through a fence onto the Metro tracks and shutting things down for a while. By the time I left, they were managing to single-track the trains, but they'd been attempting shuttle bus service earlier and were, apparently, none too successful at it. A colleague who left about an hour before I did got into the office about an hour later than I did. His tale of woe included a shuttle bus driver who didn't know the way and an attempt at walking part of the way, which proved to be much further than the person who suggested it had implied.
And, as awfully cold as it was during the week, it was even colder yesterday. I went out to run a couple of errands in the morning (bank, picking up dry cleaning, supermarket) and it was only 8 degrees Fahrenheit - before the wind chill factor. Brrr! On top of which, I got sick yesterday, with some sort of food poisoning / stomach flu sort of thing. I don't have a fever so it's unlikely to be anything worse, but it's still unpleasant. I haven't attempted eating anything today and spent most of the day in bed.
Work was also a bit crazy, for reasons that can best be summarized as "our contractor is an idiot." In short, they figured out that they'd been measuring something critical incorrectly for months, because a technician didn't bother reading the manual for some new test equipment.
Sooner or later, I will be recovered enough to write about Vietnam.
Copyright 2004 Miriam H. Nadel