author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Despite appearances, I am not dead. Thursday I got home dead tired, Friday I may have wished I was dead, but I did not in fact die. Hello!

The thing about Friday was this: I woke up with two or three headaches going on, all at once. They tag-teamed me all day long, laughing derisively at every dose of ibuprofen. I spent the day trying to stay unconscious and reading whenever I couldn't. John helped me out with the loan of a heating pad and also with the most marvelous massage, both of which helped mightily to loosen up the muscles of my back, shoulder, and neck. But it wasn't until eleven o' clock at night that I woke up from another nap to discover myself pain-free. And at eleven o'clock at night, what do you do with your sudden sense of well-being?

Stay up until three aye em, what else?

I've never had much use for the advice to "live each day as though it were your last." If I knew I was on my last day, I wouldn't just "type a little faster"; I'd resign myself to leaving projects left unfinished, because who needs the stress of FINISH ALL THE THINGS on their last day on Earth? No, I'd spend the day saying goodbye to my loved ones, putting my affairs in order, and having as much fun as I could in what little time remained. (Robin McKinley got this one absolutely right in Sunshine.)

But you know what saying I could really get behind? "Work each day as though you were going to be too sick to work tomorrow." That's how I wish I'd worked Thursday.

Thankfully, Friday was a fifth Friday, so no Friday Fictionette release was planned. (Friday Fictionettes are not weekly occurrences. They happen every first-through-fourth Friday.) And I was feeling a lot better Saturday, so I had no trouble releasing January's Fictionette Freebie to the unsubscribed masses. You can download it by following that link and clicking on the Adobe PDF icon that you see just beneath the cover photo. (Patreon makes that slightly unintuitive). You can figure out from there whether you like that sort of thing enough to subscribe.

What else? I could whine about my knee some more and about how exhausting PT is and how I wish I could have skated in the first team practice of the season Sunday, but who really wants to hear that? I don't, and I've been listening to myself whine for three weeks now. So how about I quit while I'm ahead?

Less whining tomorrow. More writing. Until then--!

First thing I learned today was about my knee. There is good news and there is bad news about my knee.

The good news is that the MRI revealed nothing worse nor more than what the doctor suspected. It's either a grade 1 (strain) or grade 2 (partial tear) of the ACL. No other part of the knee has been damaged. The doctor was particularly pleased to see healthy meniscus tissues.

The bad news is that things are not better than what the doctor suspected, and I won't be back on skates for some four to six weeks. That sucks and makes me sad and frustrated about the timing of my injury. If I had not been injured, I would have participated in travel team try-outs this weekend; if I had participated, I'd have had at least a hope of making it onto the All Stars team this season; if I had made All Stars I'd have a chance of being rostered for the Dust Devil tournament in March. No guarantees, of course. Just chances. But being off-skates until March is a guaranteed no chance at all.

If I reel in my impatience, I can remind myself that there will still be lots of season left when I return to the track. Plenty of time for me to get in on the action no matter where I'm rostered. And I've been skating pretty much non-stop since my first season. Six weeks off is no tragedy, not really. And it could have been worse! It could have been a complete tear, requiring surgery and a much longer off-skates recovery time. But it wasn't, and it didn't, and March isn't all that far away.

Until then, I'm supposed to take it easy, let things heal, wear my brace when moving around, and attend my upcoming physical therapy appointments.

And be patient.

What else did I learn today?

I learned, or relearned, that oil-based wood stain takes more than four hours to dry. By the time I wanted to stain the second side of the door, the first side was still sticky, darn it. I suppose I'll either do it last thing tonight, or, more likely, first thing tomorrow. No need to hurry, that's what I keep telling myself.

(Maybe I'll come to believe it.)

I learned that you can't trust a Rocky Mountain front range wind to continue blowing in the same direction all afternoon long, which means you need to pause before brushing off your sanding surface each time to check the wind. That is, if you don't want to get sawdust all over your clothes and in your eyes.

(And all over your borrowed knee brace.)

And I learned, or relearned, that it's not worth it to spend three and a half hours on a Puzzle Pirates Examiner article and slideshow. I'd been meaning to talk about the Duty Navigation puzzle, yes, but I didn't need to go on that long. I should have split the dang thing into four posts once I saw how wordy everything was getting. But no, I kept it all in the same post and made five different images to upload--for probably less overall return than if I'd split it up and not bothered with slideshows, come to think of it.

And had no time left afterward for working on my short story revision. Dang it.

It's OK. Whatever I didn't get to today, I'll have time for tomorrow, just so long as I move it up to the top of tomorrow's priority queue. That's the theory, anyway. No need to shove every single thing in every single day, so long as everything gets to happen sometime.

Took me long enough, but today I finally got back to the Living Room Closet Door project.

John, to give credit where credit is due, has already gotten back to work on his portion of the home improvement projects, which is to say, repainting whatever still needs repainting. He's more or less finished the bathroom as of last week and plans to do the bathroom door tomorrow. But I didn't manage to bestir myself upon those closet doors until today.

When we left for New Orleans, I was working on the third of the four bi-folds. I'd finished stripping the paint off both panels, but I'd only half-sanded the one. This was disappointing; I'd wanted to get it done and reinstalled before we left. This became unfeasible, so I consoled myself with the intention to jump right back into it the moment we returned to Boulder.

Which didn't happen. Pretty much every day up to January 10 was filled up with preparations for Epic Derby Weekend. And pretty much everything since has been filled up with the aftermath of the left knee sprain/strain. Again, it could so easily have been worse--I'm grateful there were no broken bones nor surgery involved (knock on wood, spit three times)--as injuries go, this is peanuts--but even so, things have been exhausting. Making appointments, going to appointments, acquiring this borrowed brace and deciding when to wear it, getting used to wearing it, staying aware of the injury so I don't reinjure it--no wonder I've been sleeping late and napping heavily.

As anyone who's sustained an injury (or is otherwise disabled) knows, you have to develop strategies just for moving around your world. My mobility was noticeably limited on the day after the injury. At brunch, getting from our table to the bathroom was sort of serious business. Getting down the stairs to the car so we could go to brunch was kind of awful. Just putting on my shoes was demoralizing. I was able to do it myself--just--but there was a brief spell of tears and despair on my way there.

It's been a lot better since, to the point that I'm wearing the brace primarily to remind myself that I'm injured and need to take care. Nevertheless, certain maneuvers, such as stepping over the bi-fold panel propped up on its buckets, or sitting down on the floor to smear wood putty into the panel's munched-up corner, requires conscious planning on a limb-by-joint level.

In any case, that panel is sanded to my satisfaction now, and the wood putty is drying. Tomorrow I'll stain it, and over the next couple of days I'll coat it with polycrylic. If I can also sand the other panel tomorrow and get my writing done, that would be fantastic. I like to do the sanding outside in order to minimize the need to vacuum inside. But that requires good weather outside, and there's a chance of snow on Wednesday.

I'm really tired of being in this prolonged limbo between having put most of our belongings in storage in order to stage the condo unit for listing, but not having finished the home improvement projects needed before we can list. I want to get these closet doors done, all the doors repainted, the kitchen repainted, and everything else that needs doing done so we can sell the place already.

And this third-floor business is for the birds. I totally saw this coming, y'all. I was telling people last summer that one of my personal reasons for wanting us to move was "I skate roller derby. I risk injury on a weekly basis. I need to live somewhere accessible." And now I am injured. Again, it could be worse. Thank goodness I'm not on crutches or in a wheelchair. So many people have it so much worse than I! But it doesn't take that much of an injury to come to resent deeply those 28 steps I have to climb or descend just to leave or come home.

OK, so, the DIY Rally Kit hasn't arrived in the mail yet, my team did not do very well at trivia today, AND I AM NOT SKATING TOMORROW.

*sob*

The doctor examined and palpitated and probed my knee and questioned me thoroughly about what hurts and what doesn't. "And you say this feels a lot like your injury two years ago? And that one was diagnosed as a hamstring sprain? Hmm." Because she doesn't think this is a sprained hamstring at all. She thinks it is at the very least a mildly strained ACL.

I DID NOT WANT TO HEAR ANYTHING THAT ENDED IN "CL" TODAY.

But only mildly strained! Probably! But there's nothing like misdiagnosis for encouraging yourself to make an injury worse. "I'm confident we'll get you back skating this season," she said, "but I don't want to get you back out on the track too soon and risk this turning into a complete ACL tear." So there will be an MRI as soon as we can schedule one. (And I will be grateful for our medical insurance and our savings account.) And then we will know enough to put together a recovery plan.

And for now, there will be no skating. There will hardly be any exercise. The doctor was ambivalent about letting me do any of my old PT exercises at all. "Just range of motion stuff," she said, "no strength building yet. Let the ACL heal and keep icing until we get the swelling down." There will be rest and icing and ibuprofen and there will be sadness.

(Apparently there's a faction that disrecommends icing, but I think there's a huge stretch from the studies they cite to the conclusion they're peddling. I'm going to listen to the doctor who actually looked at my knee before I listen to some article on the internet, especially one that's pushing an unhealthy dose of FUDS--fear, uncertainty, and doubt.)

So I'm wearing my borrowed brace, doing range-of-motion exercises gently and slowly, hobbling around, avoiding the ice on the ground wherever I can, and grumbling. A lot.

BRB, drowning my sorrows in short story rewrites and Examiner posts.

OK, yes, and in Puzzle Pirates.

I'm very sorry. The Friday Fictionette went up on Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoon. It did, however, go up, so you can now read the excerpt here or, if you feel like chucking a buck in my direction, downloading the whole thing as a PDF. It's called "Three Reasons to Be Afraid of the Dark," and it's about a wizard.

Not that it's an excuse... well, it is an excuse. I am full of excuses. But it's a good excuse. I just had a ridiculously big roller derby weekend, this weekend. First, there was the annual Black & Blue Ball on Friday, for which outfits needed to be assembled, gifts needed to be packaged, and pot-luck contributions needed to be arranged. Then, at last, it was time to actually go to the event. Basically, it was tons of the sort of fun that swallows up a whole day. There is always a price to be paid for fun.

Speaking of paying the price, I'm eternally grateful to our Events Committee for putting on the Ball in the first place. For them, it was everyone's fun that took up probably weeks of their spare time and energy. So. A toast!

Saturday, our league hosted a mix-up bout tournament. That's another event that takes a huge helping out of everyone's lives to make happen. And this one I feel like I can speak to with a little authority, since I'm on the Bout Production Committee. I don't feel like I near hardly pulled my own weight there, though; next bout I hope to be of more help. We set up the venue starting at 1:30, the coaches checked in at 4:30, my team started warming up at 5:15, the venue was done and cleaned up by 9:45 or so, and we were at the afterparty until 11:00. So that was Saturday.

I would have been more cheerful about the whole thing if I weren't done and out of the tournament by about 6:20. My third or maybe fourth time out on the track, I managed to sprain my knee, and that was it. The only time I hit the track after that was to join my team for their consolation/congratulation laps. Otherwise, I was sitting down with ice on my knee, or very carefully floating around the venue, keeping my left leg as stationary as possible while propelling or stopping with my right. It sounds stupid that I didn't immediately take my gear off, but, oddly enough, skating was easier on the injured joint than walking was.

And of course Sunday morning I could barely put on my own shoes. The knee didn't want to bend enough to get the foot into arm's reach.

I whine, I complain, but in reality, I'm very lucky. Three seasons of roller derby, and my worst injuries have been sprains. I know at least three skaters who are out with broken ankles at various stages of recovery, and one who tore an ACL on a skiing trip not two weeks after passing her minimum skills test. She was looking forward to trying out for the travel teams, but now she's out for at least six months. It's heartbreaking. A sprained knee? That's nothing. The timing was disappointing (seriously, knee, couldn't you have waited until the last ten minutes of our final bout instead of the first ten minutes of our first? sheesh), but I'll probably be back in action in just a few weeks. I'm very, very lucky.

And I benefit from having gone through the exact same injury two years ago. I'm not going to keep reinjuring myself for two months before taking it seriously. I'm taking it seriously right now. I'm taking it to the doctor on Wednesday, I'm pulling out my old physical therapy instructions and doing the exercises, I'm borrowing a knee brace from a league mate--all the good things.

Speaking of lucky, on Sunday we got to lay track in our brand new practice location. We have been on month-to-month leases for years, and 2014 found us homeless not once but twice. But now one of our very own skaters has offered to be our landlord. She's given us half her huge barn to convert into track space, and we're happy to pool our resources and put in the sweat equity to do it. The dirt floor got pounded flat and covered with plastic last week, and yesterday we assembled the sport court and taped the track boundaries. Today another crew from the league came in to take care of a few remaining tasks. Tomorrow night we'll have our first practice there. (Which I will probably miss, thanks to the sprained knee. Drat.)

I was on the track laying crew yesterday. Wouldn't miss it for the world. Sure, my left knee was stiff and swollen, sure, I was hobbling a bit, but as long as I moved slowly and carefully I was able to cary sport court tile around and lay it in place. I was even able to very carefully stomp the tooth-in-loop connections down with my right heel.

I won't say it didn't hurt my heart not to be one of the first people skating on the track. But seeing people skating on it Sunday afternoon gave my heart a lot more joy than pain.

Today? Pfeh. I have been absolutely useless today. I was owed an absolutely useless day, darn it, and I darn well took it. So there.

I said "solid work week," and I meant it, gosh darn it. And today has been a solid, if oddly scheduled, work day. I haven't reached my five hours yet, but I will, even if it takes me right up to 1:00 AM. Even if it means I have to ... *gulp* start working on the short story rewrite.

Remember that bit about how procrastinated tasks get heavier and heavier the longer I put them off? Well, right now that rewrite feels like it weighs some four or five tons of weaponized plutonium. The avoidance tendency is strong with this one. How strong? Strong enough that I tried really, really hard to meet my five-hour quota today by writing resumes. And the volunteer WFTDA Editor position doesn't even require a resume. I lingered lovingly over that application, though. Ditto the new DMS resume. Oh, did I linger.

It is possible that I am lingering inappropriately over this blog post, too...

Avoidance! It's what's for dinner. And also for elevensies. Which means it's time to review some avoidaince-avoidance strategies. That is, strategies for avoiding avoidance.

I come back to Havi's post about avoidance (and how to get out of it) time and time again, hoping it'll magic-bullet me into World Fantasy Award level productivity. Or any sort of productivity. Magic bullets! Why can't there be magic bullets? I was so comforted by Bruce Holland Rogers's book, Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer, where he repeatedly and unashamedly says he doesn't want to do "self-help," he has no patience for "self-help," what he wants are tricks that work. I want a trick that works. But Havi's post (from which all blockquoted bits today are drawn) is really more about ongoing self-help than it is about magic bullets, and I suspect it's because there really aren't any magic bullets.

But it does have a magic bullet for shooting a different problem: My tendency to start getting impatient with myself over the avoidance. Worse than impatient. Angry. Frustrated. Depressed, and wondering whether I've been a fraud all along. When I get like that, I need to reread the following words and hold them close to my heart:

You’re avoiding the thing that’s holding all your dreams? Good grief! Of course you are! That symbolic weight? It’s that much potential for hurt and disappointment.

If you weren’t avoiding it on some level, I’d be worried about you. If you could do the thing easily and painlessly, without having to spend years and years working on your stuff to get there… I’d probably assume that it didn’t mean everything to you.

"Doc, I have these symptoms that are really worrying me. I want to do the thing, I want to do it so bad... and then I don't do it at all, for weeks at a time. What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing's wrong with you, honey. What you're describing is a symptom of how much you want the thing."

"But that doesn't make any sense!"

"It makes perfect sense, sweetie. The more important a thing is, the scarier it is. The scarier it is, the more you want to run away. Perfectly logical when you look at it that way."

So I reread that post, and I go away with my permission-to-experience-avoidance renewed. Not that I want to experience avoidance, mind you. But I am experiencing it, and I can't exactly work through it while I'm busy denying it. So I need to stop denying it. So I need reassurance that experiencing avoidance doesn't invalidate my I Am A Writer claim. So that's the magic bullet I get out of rereading Havi's lovely post.

And then there's the ongoing self-help work part of the post: sitting with the avoidance and recognizing its legitimacy.

And every time I recognize that it’s legitimate for me to feel whatever it is I’m feeling about the way things happened to be, I get room to breathe.

But that sort of self-work takes time. And I don't want to take time about it. I want to get that rewrite done this week!

Which is where the whining and moaning and the "It's not fair!" complaining comes in. Which I guess is OK, as long as--like the famous writer said about writing itself--I indulge in it in private and wash my hands afterwards. So. This is where I run away and have my "It's not fair!" temper tantrum off-stage.

[ muzak interlude ]

OK, I'm back. With thoughts. Here's my thought: I'm going to take a little time to do the self-work. Just a little, every day, telling myself things like, "I see you there, avoidance. I recognize you as a valid expression of fear. What am I afraid of, and what do I need to feel safe enough to do the work?" And I'm going to allow myself to count it toward my total count of time spent working on the short story, just like I would time spent staring into space, mulling over plot problems, or typing up verbose character backgrounds and worldbuilding notes.

Basically, I'm legitimizing the time spent working on the avoidance. Which will go a long way toward legitimizing the avoidance itself.

I won’t say that it’s easy or anything. But it beats the hell out of drawing the conclusion that stuckification and avoidance mean that my dreams aren’t important to me.

Because they are. They must be. Because they still scare me.

I'd rather not be scared. But if I've got to be scared, I rather be scared and productive, rather than simply scared stiff.

Today we will praise pizza, and the very best of pizzas. Sing, O Muse, of pizza! Pizza created by the Mellow Mushroom in many great cities across these wide United States--including that of Metairie, Louisiana--and in as many varied ways! Pizza with four cheeses! Pizza with charbroiled oysters and lemon juice and parmesan cheese! Pizza preceded by great portabella caps stuffed to their gills with roasted artichoke hearts, covered with a thick crust of cheese, and resting upon field greens dressed with balsamic vinaigrette! Ah, pizza. Let us sing.

Boulder used to have a Mellow Mushroom, back when we first moved into town. It was in the retail plaza set back from the southwest corner of 18th and Pearl. It was there until I think 2001 when Gondolier moved in. (Said retail plaza is no more--the corner's under construction and everything in it except Frasca has been torn down. Gondolier is now in the Meadows plaza at Baseline and Foothills.). But I remember walking into the dimly lit, lofty space and seeing a gigantic scary buffalo head leering down from the corner above the kitchen. Not a real buffalo head, not a hunting trophy--just a huge plushy with goggly stoner eyes and probably a bunch of University of Colorado sports memorabilia caught up in its shaggy mane.

Surely someone once upon a time took a picture and uploaded it to the internet? My Google-Fu is failing me. The only record I can seem to find of that location's existence is on this page.

The Metairie location is upstairs in the Forum building at Vet's and Causeway. It's decorated with fleur-de-lis everywhere. Even the restaurant's name sign, which you'd think would be the same at every location in order to satisfy branding requirements, incorporates a fleur-de-lis which itself incorporates a mushroom. (I didn't think to take a picture at the time, and I think most of John's pictures have gone straight to SnapChat and thence to oblivion.) The decor inside celebrates jazz musicians. A monstrosity made of fake instruments piled in an inverted pyramid occupies the central place of honor as a color-shifting lighting fixture. They've done their damnedest to make this chain's New Orleans-area location feel like a New Orleans-area restaurant. Might I call your attention once more to the charbroiled oyster pizza? They also have the "Bayou Bleu," which features grilled shrimp and andouille sausage in a spicey bleu cheese base. How I wish I liked bleu cheese.

The selection of local draft beers is respectable. I tasted 40 Arpent Red Bean Ale (a red ale, of course) and Parish Canebrake (a wheat). If neither had appealed, I was ready to order a pint of Lazy Magnolia's Southern Pecan.

Every booth has a small flat-screen TV installed on the wall. One family utilized this to keep their kids entertained with cartoons on Nickelodeon. The diners eating next-booth-over had their TV tuned to football. We, of course, just used the AC outlet it was plugged into to keep our laptops running. (The in-house wi-fi worked great for me. John inexplicably had DNS trouble getting past their log-in/terms&conditions screen.)

My only real complaint about today's experience is that they took away the classic rock mix I was digging in order to play non-stop Christmas songs. This time of year, any restaurant that doesn't play non-stop Christmas songs gets my aggressively repeat business and vocal thanks (yay Dot's Diner yesterday!). The light rock and oldies stations are playing them on the radio. The mall is playing them. The TV is full of them. I think I can safely remain innocent of Grinch accusations if I say that not every single public place needs to board the Christmas train, right?

Or at least have the frickin' imagination to include some Hanukkah songs in the mix, yeah? (Shock! No single religion has a monopoly on holiday songs!) And if all you can think of is "Dreidl Dreidl Dreidl" or "Hanukkah O Hanukkah," do a little research. There are quite a few good tunes out there. The kids at Metairie Park Country Day sing a decent sample every year during their Caroling in the Atrium event. And tossing in "The Christians and the Pagans" wouldn't kill anyone, you know?

And for God's sake--any God you like--cut "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" out of your set list WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE. Especially any version sung by an adult attempting to imitate a lisping child. Ideally, the song should be sung to an upbeat tempo and by no one older than 12. All sustained attempts to whistle should be rejected out of hand. And any version sung in double-slow time should be banned by the Geneva Convention. Seriously, y'all, I only want one beer at lunch. I do not want to be forced to drink a second and a third to dull the pain.

Mellow Mushroom of Metairie! Looking forward to returning on my next trip home, when the holiday season is safely behind us!

So here's the thing about smartphone-powered wi-fi hotspots: They only work if your smartphone is getting signal. For large stretches of track, it won't get signal. So if you've put off working on your Friday assignment until the City of New Orleans leaves Chicago Union Station at 8:05 PM, and you don't get it done until somewhere after Effingham (say, midnight Central time), then you're just going to have to wait until the train gets to Centralia and that's all there is to it.

In other words, this blog post and the accompanying Friday Fictionette will be coming to you a touch late. Mea culpa. It's half past midnight now; I mean to stay up until both critters are uploaded. If that means I have to be awake when we hit Carbondale, so be it.

I hate coming up with titles. "Stealing the Crown Jewels" is at least marginally clever and refers to at least two things in the story. But it doesn't quite make me go yeah, that's the ticket. And I get this weird superstitious feeling that, by coming up with a title for a Fictionette four times a month, I'm using up my title ju-ju. Really weird, right? Do something often and you'd think you'd get better at it, right? But no, lizard brain is all YOU ARE CONSUMING A NON-RENEWABLE RESOURCE, STOP NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE--

Lizard brain needs a good night's sleep, and also a hug.

For the first time, I appear to have accomplished the paint-stripping stage in a single day. (At least, as concerns one half of a bi-fold door. I didn't try doing both at once this time because that was just awkward.) The secret appears to be this: Assign yourself a writing task you really, really, really don't want to do. One you've been avoiding for weeks now. Suddenly, the paint-stripping job looks like an enjoyable use of your time.

Most of this week, I've been slotting the following item among my writing tasks for the day: "Get that dang short story revised finally. Do you want a shot at getting it published or don't you?" (May not be an exact quote.) And it's amazing how focused I stay on my proposed writing schedule right up until I reach that item. Then, anything looks like a better use of time. Getting my AINC reading done early. Spending just a few more minutes on Second Life or Puzzle Pirates. Taking a nap that mysteriously stretches out to four or five hours. Getting really meticulous about removing paint from the corners of the panel beveling on the closet doors.

One day I will figure out the trick of getting myself to just do a thing already. For now, the process seems to involve several days--maybe several weeks--of inching up on it like a very cautious cat preparing to pounce. The pounce does eventually happen. I take consolation from knowing that. I'd just like to get to the point where the preparation doesn't take so darn long.

The donuts did not happen. The adventures did not happen. The karaoke did not happen--at least, not with me. The headaches happened, and they ruined everything.

I managed to make it as far as breakfast at the Northside Kitchen--and yes, they did have donuts, but they also had lamb shank hash with three eggs any style. This was delicous and left no room for donuts, despite the wide variety and appeal of the donuts. (Maybe tomorrow.) But by the time I was done eating and walking back to my room, yesterday's headache had returned, and it brought all its friends. I just wanted to crawl back into bed and become unconscious. This I did. And I stayed there until eight o'clock tonight: napping, reading when I wasn't napping, and, when the pain even kept me from reading, wimpering pathetically.

They got worse before they got better, but they have gotten better. I seem to be functional now. So, here: have a Friday Fictionette! This one takes its title from the Robert Browning quote, "If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens." I'm not sure what the context for that quote is. I presume the bread was just that good. The bread in the Fictionette is quite remarkable too. But you must never, ever, under any circumstances, eat it.

I check out of the resort tomorrow and make my way back to Boulder. I wish I had spent less of my time curled up in bed with books--or, rather, I wish that the time I'd spent curled up in bed with books was not partially motivated by headaches. But there will be other visits. There will almost certainly be a visit next year. And, overall, I've enjoyed my stay.