COUGH, HACK, WHEEZE!

I have been under the weather, as the Toxic Cupcake turned out to be actually toxic - she brought a bug to the office and I got it. I spent the weekend in a drugged haze, which was nowhere near as fun as it sounds. I feel like I have a massive, skull-crushing hangover without any of the fun preceding it, accompanied by a waterfall from my sinuses down the back of my throat. I sound like a bad lab experiment involving Kathleen Turner and Rod Stewart and can't say ten words without coughing up a lung like I spent 40 years in a coal mine. (Cupcake of course, spent a few days sniffling and delicately coughing and being winsomely peaked, and is now fresh as a daisy and cute as a button, because she's that way.) She was really sweet and apologetic about contaminating me and genuinely appeared to mean it, so we are still working on our relationship, and I now call her Toxic Cupcake here with tongue in cheek. If she stops bitching about me to our actual BOSS live and in person, I'll stop bitching about her here anonymously and without doing any actual, intentional harm to her freaking career or relationships at work.

I'm knitting socks for Boy, using a small fraction of the yarn I thought would be good for a shawl but didn't like in action. The Pi Are Square shawl did not float my boat in person, and I frogged it, so I am left with a boatload of Shepherd Sport in Jeans. I am not all that fond of it as a sock either, it is pooling like hell and not in a charming, swirly way, but in a babyshit brown because we are doing one of those "I read a book on potty-training the baby by letting him run around without a diaper on the nice blue carpet," things, but they're really soft and Boy will stuff them in a hiking boot so the colors don't matter. I will apologize for the color. I have better colors on the way.

And I started a second Softball Cotton baby blanket, brioche stitch, mindlessly blue and sweet. I have concluded that brioche stitch is the thing for boy baby lace-but-not-lace, boyish, itty-bitty-manly loose-knit ribbing stuff. I will have a stack of baby blankies on hand to distribute whenever, wherever.

El Jefe approved my vacation time. I'm going to Asheville.