From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I worked at home for the last two and a half days on the grounds that I seemed to have flu-lite (ache-free and 30% fewer calories than regular flu). I think I consumed 10 pots of tea in that time, most with lemon juice added. (Free advice: never add lemon juice to vanilla hazelnut tea.) I spent most of the time sitting at the kitchen table using my laptop; my shoulder and back aches are reinforcing my decision to stand to program at work.

My throat was still scratchy this morning, but when I looked out the window and saw thick fog as far as the eye could see, I got excited. Metro Denver only gets serious fog every few years. And after nearly two years of broken, my fog lights got fixed on Saturday. I'd be damned if I missed a chance to use them! As a bonus, the rush hour commuters who drive slowly on C-470 if there's an accident in the ditch on the other side of the road managed to handle the fog with surprising sensibility and flow.

I got out of bed at 11 or later this morning (in part because I stayed up watching an episode of the original Star Trek series). I spent the next several hours expelling phlegm from my upper body, but my head felt pretty clear. I cleaned the felavitory (aka the cat box), had relationship discussions with Tam, had a shower, and started cooking turkey soup.

After my slow and steady vegtable cutting and other cullinary business I sat down with a bowl of said soup and read Wikipedia articles about the Chinese lunisolar calendar (maybe I should get an account so I can link this to the Chinese remainder theorem), Chinese numerals and number systems, the five elements, and I Ching. After that, I stopped sneezing and dribbling every five minutes, meaning I get 6 hours of sick-free time in a four day extended weekend.

At Tam's request I then proceeded to make some tasty baked apples, drink tea, and watch Family Guy. None of this involves actual writing, so my impressive word count for the day is 716. Those words are all in Lake over Water, ䷯: Oppression (Exhaustion). It's the shortest chapter I've written so far, and I've been unsure of how I was going to make it work for at least a day. I can tell that what I wrote is somewhat incongruous with the traditional wisdom of the hexigram. It also doesn't do a very good job of defining the two characters, who I'm still not sure how to handle.

My total word count is 18927, 13719 on the I Ching story. However, Wednesday and Sunday together came to only 1,000 words (a decimyriad), so at least I'm above 2,000 on a good day. Since I'm clearly not going to reach 50,000 by Thursday, I suppose I should start measuring progress in hexagrams, of which I've done 12 (20%). I'd like to hit them all in a "month," say by dawn on winter solstice. In the hexagram measure, I need to pick up the pace a bit, especially since I don't have another four day block to sit around in my gnome pajamas and only leave the apartment to throw trash in the dumpster. But it's comforting to see that I could write more than twice as much in less than half the time when I've got the right subject matter