Beyond kick-ass pictures of the real-live wilderness and a T-shirt with Tlingit-like art of stylized hummingbirds, I brought back a kick-ass rhinovirus. Jesus do I hate a cold.

Beyond the usual hatefulness of a stuffed head, aches and booger production, this episode includes a hacking cough, immune to rivers and vats of cough syrup and guaifenesin and dextromethorphan, time-release, immediate release, slugged and pounded in pill form. Sleeping is consequently a distant fantasy of something I once enjoyed uninterrupted. A couple more days of this bullshit and I might have to go beg some opiates off of a medical doctor with the special joy that is codeine.

Still and all, I managed to hunker back down at work and get caught up in post-vacation malaise. I also weeded my pathetic garden and trimmed hedges that had grown in some kind of suburban Murphy’s law of getting well beyond head high shrubbery, because we weren’t there to will it smaller.

Speaking of the pathetic garden. The chamomile thrives and the tomato plant has flowers, but all else is anemic. And, clearly some kind of something enjoys the basil such that I may never get more than a speck of a hole-riddled leaf myself. It lives, though, partially because we had the next-door 10-year-old boy keep an eye out an water in exchange for cash money. We actually only alluded to payment, as his mother volunteered that it would be no problem for him.

Note to other no-kids neighbors out there. If you’re a couple of folks who piss money away regularly (e.g. we bought an original artwork on a cruise ship), you’re apt to throw, say, $50 in a Chinese red money envelope. If you do so, it’s entirely possible mom might walk you up to the front steps to return most of it, or at least half as “too much.” Maybe I’m wrong, maybe he thought it, too, but either way it was a fun retro moment in modern suburbia.

My only real fear is our lack of fiscal restraint is misinterpreted as something nefarious. I figure your average pedophile probably is generous to a fault, you know, ‘cuz it helps in duping and encouraging young minds.

The thing that I’m not writing about, because the cough has zapped my strength, is teamwork, team playing and team sports. I’m having fun with the whole sadness that is my playing softball after work. Philosophically, I have all sorts of wasted bullshit to impart, kind of like wisdom, but it will have to wait for another day.

The pity is I seldom had fun playing organized ball in the traditional ball-playing years of youth.

In other news, we can see whales from shore at the beach near our house.

My joy was almost uncontainable on Friday evening. After a long, hard week of working for a living, I crested the hill and rolled down the highway toward the Pacific Coast Highway and our home. On Friday’s run I saw the lights of a Ferris Wheel rotating in the sky. A cheap, local carnival in the parking lot of the Sea Bowl, a local bowling area directly across the street from the next beach up to ours, the rock classically named Rockaway Beach. I didn’t hesitate to convince M. to change our plans for grilling up dinner to a walk over to the fair. Nothing I like better than a traveling carnival and losing money for low-quality plush toys.

Before the sunset, as we walked up the hill to the fair with a panoramic view of the ocean, we noticed the unmistakable spouts of water we had just paid out big money to witness in Juneau. By Saturday, I had a more powerful pair of binoculars and sat on the beach for hours watching the spots and dives of migrating gray whales head north for the summer.

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