Feed Her! Feed the Hungry Jill!

Yawn, cough, wake from the slumber. After a multi-week hiatus, The Ballad is back online. Huzzah!

So I like this: I write a post on February 24th that says "It's Sunday, and I'm sick," I proceed to write nothing for three weeks, and only one person, Jill, writes me and says "hey, what happened to the blog?" Really, folks, the love is overwhelming. I could be lying somewhere in the Sonoran desert, gasping for breath, impaled by a saguaro cactus, my dying words being "please, somewhat, update the blog, let the world know I mattered." And you people, you readers - both of you - would have said, "Hey, no blog entry? I wonder what's on According to Jim tonight." Ouch. No, Elton, I cannot feel the love tonight.

Anyhoo, props to Jill for her behavior that semi-resembled human decency but makes her a saint compared to the rest of you. Phbbbbbbbt. She wins this months special prize, a personalized "hey, what's up?" e-mail from Nyet. Shame on all the others.

As for what happened - I contracted bubonic influenza or something and coincidentally got hit by a bus on the same day. I vaguely remember watching the Oscars three weeks ago, alternating between sweating my brains out and shivering with cold. Awesome. I seem to remember Jon Stewart being nice to the lady who won the Oscar for best song. Otherwise, I was d&c for so long it was false, and my lack of enthusiasm for existence was paralleled by the animation of the Coen bros.

The next three days I slept. This easily qualified as a top five sickness experience for me; I felt so ill I couldn't concentrate enough to watch tv. Seriously, the complexities of law & order were blowing my mind. I've watched that show after my knee surgeries while doped up on vicodin and things were fine, but this flu bug sapped all linear narrative capabilities. Lacking the ability to comprehend Chris Noth, I thought that attempting to adorn the Ballad with its usual witticisms would be a lost cause. So i gave up on writing for a bit.

Besides a few missed days of work, my viral inconvenience had other waves of impact. My Tuesday night Ulti team lost 15-4. I'm not about to claim that I can turn things around enough to win a game like that. But we ended up missing the playoffs on point differential - and we missed by two points. So if I'm even worth +3, that would've helped things. Of course, in my state that Tuesday night, I would've been worth -7. So while my absence seemingly cost us a playoff berth, it also helped us avoid losing 15 to negative 3. So that's good. Fortunately, my Thursday night team had locked up at least the two seed the week before, so when I missed that night's game, no biggie. All in all the illness put two weeks between my Ultimate games, but that's a tale for another post.

Despite my better efforts - and despite my sleeping in the living room for three nights - Beck got sick, too. Either she is not as big of a wuss as I am or she has some serious immune system skills, though, because she only missed about a day and a half of work. I was and am massively impressed. We both got a post-sickness horrendous cough that persisted for about a week and a half after the fact. And we had the general energy-sappedness that accompanies these things. When i got back to work, I coughed my way through hours of tutoring and generally felt like collapsing at the end of each night. Bleh.

So that accounts for the first 9 days or so of posting absence. The second half occurred because Beck's and my parents were in town for a collective week and a half. We had a great time and were busy busy every day. Rather than post sporadically, I thought I'd wait and give a full-visit account. So that will be coming in its own posts soon.

Right now, though, I have to get ready to go to a Cubs spring training game. Wahoo! Thanks to the generosity of D&C (our phoenix friends, not the afore-referenced led zep song), we've been able to go to several games this spring. Quite fun - this'll be my fourth, Beck's first. If we get it in, that is, as there are some rather ominous clouds hanging out over normally sunny Azz today.

So this is a Nyet-approved promise for a veritable post explosion. Links are overdue. Pictures need to be seen. I will get on this. Know that my fantasy baseball drafts are all happening in the next few days as well, so you'll get that screamingly interesting info, too. Seriously - I can't let this month be a posting void. This is the two year anniversary of my blog* , so we're not going to let flus and parents crush a grand literary effort. So get ready for some entries on this here exciting life.

* - (if you count the first six months over at nyetjones.org) (incidentally, this is also the two year anniversary of S&W's last fight - here's to a dearth of trips to the ER with a bloody Wrigley!)