Recovery blog.

Feeling better now. Whatever virus was making me cough so much has been mostly overcome by my immune system, though I’m still coughing a little more than normal. Still, after more than a week, it’s a relief. For the moment, I’m appreciating my health, which is generally good. I hate being sick. You’d think that almost everyone would say that, but I’m not so sure.

Yuriko had a cold of her own at the beginning of the weekend, more of a nose problem, and neither of our conditions really improved until Sunday, so that cut into our enjoyment of the holiday. At least the kids were healthy. That’s a good thing, but it also means they have a lot more energy than you do, rather than somewhat more.

Then there’s the rain. It’s been almost tropical here, not in terms of the heat (70s today, cooler some days), but in the way huge storms have come and gone and come and gone in the last few weeks. Some towns have taken it hard, with flooding east of us, along the Des Plaines River especially. For us, it’s just tiresome. The garden is still half-underwater. Mosquitoes are taking advantage of the pooled water to make copies of themselves. I haven’t been able to mow the grass much lately.

Actually, I’m not bothered too much by that last one.

Reading about the upcoming Transit of Venus, along with the near-daily heavy rains we’ve been getting, makes me think of a SF story I read in junior high. I can’t remember the name of the story, or who the author was, or even how it ended. Things get lost in the warehouses of memory. But I do remember that it was set on Venus. Not the super-hot Venus we know from spacecraft observations, but a science-fiction planet before science caught up with it, a place whose constant cloud cover resulted in constant rain on the surface.

At least three men -- astronauts? colonists? escaped convicts? political castoffs? -- were somehow stranded out in unending rain, looking for shelters that had been built on the planet, because the constant drubbing of the rain was driving them mad. At one point they saw a shelter, but like a mirage oasis, it turned out to be useless: a roofless shell, victim of some disaster. Later, or maybe right after that disappointment, one of them ran off into the distance and shot himself. The others could barely hear the shot. That’s all I remember, but the idea of being driven crazy by the rain stuck with me.