sick day

One day back and I'm already taking a sick day. But I've got a nasty cold that turned southward toward my lungs, and with a proclivity toward pneumonia, it seems hardly worth it to push. Of course I also managed to infect J, who snored all night and will probably end up far sicker than I am. Ah, the gifts we give those we love. So it's oatmeal and tea, some Emergen-C, and if I get brave, a trip to CVS for Mucinex.

But beyond my phlegm, there's a slightly more interesting development in my 550 square feet. My beloved phalenopsis orchid, a gift received from my adviser after passing my ph.d. exams (a process that destroyed my life--and my relationships--for a year), finally shed its two extraneous leaves. Now down to three healthy paddles of green, it's poised, I believe, to bloom for the first time in three years. It's flowers are hearty and white and they stick around long enough to welcome the first hints of summer, at least they did last time. I love the mystery of the orchid, blooming only when it wants, seemingly without any correspondence to my gentle feeding and care. While there's no flowering stalk yet, I'm thinking that 2010 bodes well for ms. orchid. It better, because she was the only plant that I moved from North Carolina last summer. After fifteen years of totting around a giant, alien begonia that I could never definitively identify and that the nurse gave me in eleventh grade, I ditched it with the orchid-giving adviser. I just couldn't bear its gothic overgrowth for another moment and so I abandoned it at her doorstep and drove North. Now I exist with only a single hint of green--