Bleah. Have some sort of Bug O'Doom. I fell into bed last night after a pleasingly strenuous evening conducting our traditional Boxing Day braai (20 people plus a thundering herd of 5 small girl-children - happy image of the evening, Evil Landlord being enthusiastically embraced around the knees by Alexandra, aged 2). Then I lay awake for hours in the more or less foetal position while my head pounded and great waves of nausea ran up and down my hapless form. (No, not the booze: I never get to drink much while I'm hosting, owing to the mad frantic. Which, I hasten to add, I rather enjoy. Also, my yearbook photo should be captioned Most Likely To Lose Her Gin At Parties).

This morning isn't much better - nausea still present, can't eat, head pounds, feeling shivery despite balmy day. Evil Landlord laughing at me a lot, but on the upside he did finish the washing up, which I stopped doing owing to the way my head fell off every time I bent over to put things into the dishwasher. Also, have been crashed on my bed for the last hour and a half, where I was unexpectedly joined by the Hobbit, who doesn't usually do beds. Odd cat: can't work out if he senses I'm ill and is trying to help, or if he senses my weakness and is waiting for me to pass out so he can gnaw on me.

Quite the most irritating part of having a recurring sinus problem is the fact that if you're feeling too sick to eat, you can't eat anything which means you can't really take anti-inflammatories for the sinus headache without them making you feel sick. Sicker. Whatever. This circle vicious, do not prod with sticks. Have managed an Advil after half a slice of dry toast, so the pain is receding a tad.

Am going back to bed now. Hope your day is better than mine.

Another of those misty Cape Town mornings in which the peninsula has clearly woken up, rolled over in bed, thought "bugger all these seasonal expectations, anyway", and huddled itself down into a comforting shroud of gentle rain, soft skies and a drifting sea fog forming a separate layer below the clouds, like a sheet under a duvet. Come to sunny Cape Town! Bring umbrella.

My image clusters this morning suggest that actually I'd also rather be back in bed. Fair comment. I'm a bit fragile because Sid the Sinus Headache is trying to make a comeback, which I'm ruthlessly undermining from within via a cynical media campaign, using my tabloid agents Lots of Vitamins and Stv's High-Chilli-Quotient Thai curry. The gin/chardonnay combination which accompanied the Thai food last night may also be contributing its mite to the rather-be-in-bed stakes, admittedly. Other than that, of course, the weather is making me predictably happy, and the Monday billboards were particularly entertaining:

TIGER NOW 6 OVER PAR
Poor Tiger's indiscretions are inevitably doomed to give rise to more, and more horrible, bad golfing puns than one would have believed humanly possible. There's a sort of unctuous schadenfreude in it, too - his media image is so much Nice Young Man that the tabloids seem to be deriving a compensatory pleasure in shredding him.

RONALDO REMOVES SHIRT!
I love the complete inconsequentiality of this. Undoubtedly there's an actual incident behind it, but it simply begs to be ramified into a whole string of similar incidents: OBAMA HAS CUP OF COFFEE! BRAD PITT CLEANS TEETH! PARIS HILTON WEARS PANTS!

And, finally, memorably,
GUBAI DUBAI!
Alas Dubai, someone popped your bubble, which was frankly always an absurdly overblown and self-indulgent bubble, anyway. Gubai indeed.

The mad social whirl continues unabated. Fed raclette to jo&stv and d_hofryn on Sunday night, mmmm, cheese. Fed lasagne to waynne&jean last night, on the grounds that renovatory sods have dug up the entire floor of their house (except the bedroom) and they can't cook, sit, shower, or eat or breathe without excessive intrusion by dust. (I am all braced for our own renovations, starting in a week or two following the unexpectedly efficient approving of the plans by Council, go figure. Also go dragonroost, Man with Plan). Tonight, game. Tomorrow night, ballet. Friday night, the grad ceremony for all my orientation leaders. Weekend, collapse in the horizontal position and sleep for more hours than the weekend actually contains. Not a social butterfly, me. Require recharge time. Like a dodgy battery. Particularly since I'm once again feeling as though someone socked me in the throat several times before wantonly unplugging me from the wall socket and sticking me into the Duracell bunny to run pink fluffy marathons, or whatever. Body, she is scratched.

It's not helping that my Favourite Masters Student, TM, dropped by my office this morning in order to enthuse about all the fascinating reading she's doing, the which I have no time to do. Phooey. The problem with the glory days of postgrad lounging, free of 9-5 commitments and defined by drifting in a becomingly dilettante fashion between the computer screen, the tea supplies and the pile of new sf and toothsome, weighty critical tomes, is that one doesn't bloody appreciate them when they're happening. Mostly, of course, because one is too busy whinging about the total shortage of money, but hey, money isn't everything. By Freudian slippage I originally wrote "money isn't anything". Word.

Waaah! I wanna be a grad student again. Or, at the very least, an academic. I'm losing the lingo, because administration and student advice do not, alas, allow one to exercise the muscles of nuanced, insightful sophistication of thought - not even over the weekends, because I'm too bloody tired. If I stick around much longer I'm going to become an administrator, and heaven forfend.

In the Department of Extemporanea The "I Just Get These Headaches", I gave up codeine a few years back, owing to a rueful awareness that I was retreating from tension headaches into a drugged-out haze all too frequently. My life post-drugs has been surprisingly the same, and generally free of cravings; anti-inflammatories fulfil all my pain-deadening needs (except the recent rampages of Sid), while incidentally supplying a happy excuse to start the day with a chocolate doughnut occasionally. To cushion the stomach, you know.

Of course, this does mean that when I apparently spend the night sleeping in a semi-levitated state with my feet in the air and my neck at a 45^o angle and subsequently can't move properly for the back and neck pain, I greet the codeine haze like an old, dear, slightly dodgy friend. You know, the kind that arrives unexpectedly to get you involuntarily plastered the night before your life-hinging interview. Or your wedding. On the upside, codeine does tend to make me beam vaguely at students, which seems to be freaking them out a little. Heh.

Since I'm generally far too happily doped to think intelligently about Torchwood, herewith the two links I inadvertently left off the last random linkery.

• Courtesy of pumeza, who mentioned them at book club, feral houses. Weirdly beautiful. Also pleasingly reminiscent of The Family Tree, which is possibly my favourite Sheri Tepper ever.
• Twilight sex toys. (NS at all FW). You can chill the damned thing to get that authentic vampire sex experience of cold, dead flesh. Also, it sparkles in sunlight. Words fail me.

The Evil Sinus Infection thingy has taken on a new twist, namely a roaring temperature with a truly crippling headache - this latest one woke me up at 4am on Monday morning and caused me to take Advil on an empty stomach in sheer desperation, thus adding nausea to the list of symptoms. I dozed off from 6am until about until 8.30, staggered to the phone to tell work I wouldn't be in, fell back into bed and slept until half past two. This is weird, I never sleep in the day. And the wretched headache is only marginally dulled by painkillers, too - when not actually passed out I had it full force until yesterday evening, upon which it started tapering off, possibly because of the soothing application of hot rum toddies.

Still very shaky today and with a sort of a vague headache in the middle distance, ambled around the house doing nothing much apart from, yet again, dismally failing to sort out the bloody Windows install on my Dad's computer. (Got further this time. Now the screen blues out instead of blacking out while it's refusing to log me into Windows until I'm activated. Also, have conceived passionate loathing for the very Zen process of flashing through five different shades of black while it's rebooting. It's been rebooting a lot, entirely futilely).

And, speaking of shades of black, my copy of the new Torchwood series, Children of Earth, arrived, and I watched it over the last two evenings. It was mostly very good, intense and chilling in parts, but I'm incubating a fresh new Russell Davies rant. Watch this space.

Good lord, my subconscious has suddenly caught on to the fact that I'm all wistful about the comparative dream-lack in my recent life. Last night it presented me with the following:

1. An extremely high-speed motorbike ride to Jo'burg with my friend Michelle, racing each other on separate bikes. (I think she won).
2. My desperate attempts to photograph a medieval church which was projecting a mirage image shaped like a gigantic, glowing white elephant.
3. Hanging around with my mother and Obama in the latter's private airport. (Not aircraft, airport. Grimy, and full of middle-class families with screaming kids).
4. Some kind of military scenario aboard a battleship in which the captain was deliberately sabotaging things by flipping strategic switches on enormous switchboards. We later sank.

I am somewhat unsurprised to have woken up rather tired, and with a sore neck. Also, this mutant glowing red eye is becoming more mutant and painful by the hour. Hopefully the judicious application, to a complicated schedule imposed by the Nice Replacement Doctor (mine's on leave, the slacker), of two different sorts of eyedrops will somewhat lessen the sensation of having been plugged in the eye by a red-hot curried baseball bat.

Random Ginormous Epic Fantasy Series Month continues! And, in the Department of Multi-Volume Fantasies I Inflicted On My Hapless Masters Supervisor, Patricia McKillip! More exactly, McKillip's Riddlemaster of Hed series, which squeaks in under the wire as a Ginormous Fantasy Epic only because it was published in three slim vol.s rather than one fat one. It is, however, one of my favourites. McKillip writes dense, evocative, luminous, sometimes difficult prose which makes you both work for your meaning, and damned well enjoy it. Her world is small-scale, slightly domestic, filled with wonderful eccentrics and landscapes through which her heroes, Morgan and Radaerle, wander with a vague and slightly bloody-minded determination. The plot, world, quest all revolve around riddles, presented ritualistically, their posing and answers central to identity, destiny and history. More importantly for my bunny-hugging Masters purposes, rulers of the various realms in the story have a land-sense, a magical connection with their demesne which both underlines and permits their stewardship of it. It makes my little ecological heart go pit-a-pat.

In a nutshell: riddles, arguments, quests, travels, love stories, the cussedness of kings, bonus shapeshifters and incredibly beautiful descriptions of same, harps and harpists, storms, lost children, ruined cities, these were pearls that were his eyes. Occasional moments of blank incomprehension owing to having been socked between the eyes by an indecently good turn of phrase. Too short.

Still with the vampires! For an extremely sly and entertaining take on vampire evolution via entirely cynical corporate interests, see this "Powerpoint presentation". It's apparently a companion to Peter Watts's novel Blindsight, a copy of which I shall have to procure forthwith.

In other news, my morning has been rendered considerably more surreal by a sudden North Korean nuke to the back of the head. Scary-Go-Round is currently even more off-the-wall than usual. Atlantis is rotting to the logical fibre. Ask my Falkenstein party.

The order of the day is clearly distraction. My current family crisis appears to be pursuing its tensions and disagreements somewhere in the vicinity of my navel, since my stomach has been in random and excruciating knots since approximately Friday. If I'm looking pained in your immediate vicinity, please don't take it personally.

We had a thunderstorm this morning! very happy-making, although not productive of actual rain. The weather is surprisingly hot and sultry, although that may simply be my roaring temperature talking.

Spent the day at home yesterday on account of feeling dreadful, rinse and repeat today. Had to trundle up to campus briefly yesterday to give my last lecture, since it was the last day of term, no rescheduling possible, and there was Vital Exam Stuff I'd promised to tell them. The brief outing left me feeling rather weird - dizzy, sweaty, shaky - although still uncannily able to burble more or less coherently about fanfic, cultural appropriation, demographics, geniune female-centred erotica, and what have you. Informed class that if I had a brain I'd spend the last ten minutes neatly tying up the disparate and yet strangely linked themes of the lecture series, encompassing vampire texts, sex blogs and fan fiction in one giant meta-theory of eroticism, representation and unreality, but since the 'flu had left me with no brain worth mentioning, the synthesis was left as an exercise for the student. They seemed surprisingly cool with this, which suggests that I must somehow have at least partially vouchsafed to them the surreality of the underlying metaphor. Also, amused, but that may have been because I was revealing my enormous geekhood by quoting bits of Cassie Claire from memory.

Spent a lot of the day reading Sharon Shinn, a surprisingly girly stash of which I discovered on my Evil Landlord's groaning shelves. She seems to be one of those writers who defaults to a romance structure, in the sense of Mills and Boon romance, but very entertainingly. Interesting magic, and her people are very real.

Apparently the one actual sales assistant in Telkom who is cheerful, friendly, knowledgeable, efficient and empathetic continues to be so, since he unlocked international calls within twenty minutes of me sending him a narked email, and without me having to go into the store as the UnHelpLine insisted was necessary. He also apologised. I think the FSM just touched me with his noodly appendage. Or maybe the shivery thrills are my 'flu talking, which it's doing quite loudly this morning, in an aggressive monotone.

The Daily Voice seems to have abandoned billboard poetry for the nonce, allowing my roving analytical eye to alight instead on the Sun, another noxious little tabloid, which today is evincing an interesting pattern of what I can only describe as Sudden Ellipsoid Reversal. To wit:
HER DADDY LOVED HER ... TO DEATH!
MOTHER THROWS BABY ... TO SAFETY!
Glossing right over the probably squicky circumstances of the first instance, I rather enjoy the way these headlines hoik you up, leave you dangling for an instant and then plunge you sharply into the the absolutely antithetical situation. Bonus points for breathless emphasis and narrative tension.

There's a small pile of Vital Admin on my desk, including at least one Extremely Difficult student who has thoroughly colonised my goat by mailing me daily to demand why I haven't sorted his life out yet. Once I have processed these, I'm going home. Because my 'flu demands it, and I'm feeling obedient. Also, crap.

Oh, joy, after a week of exhaustion, weird spaceyness and the short-fuse temper from hell, the head-cold part of this bloody 'flu thing has hit. Once again I am a disgusting object, with Sid the Sinus Headache joyously laying cement in my skull. I managed, however, to distract myself from it sufficiently this evening to help the Evil Landlord produce a fondue evening for jo&stv and sven&tanya, which was fun, particularly since I elected to try out tempura batter in the fondue pot for the first time. (Verdict: good, and lightens the meat-heavy quotient of your average oil fondue, although it's difficult to get the fat truly hot enough on the tiny spirit flame). We fondued thin bits of sweet potato, butternut, brinjal, carrot and asparagus. Also, tempura-battered prawns ftw.

The really weird meeting of minds I have with Jo can be indexed in the perfectly serious fifteen-minute discussion we subsequently had about the exciting and inevitable art installation we could mount by disassembling a brand new latest-model Japanese small car (Honda or Toyota, or possibly a Suzuki motorcycle), and tempura-battering and deep-frying its component parts before reassembling and suspending it in exploded-car-diagram format. We feel this would constitute profound and self-aware cultural commentary, emblematising the interchangeability of consumer-cultural paradigms while simultaneously investigating notions of "freshness" and "value"¹. We are open to grant offers which would enable the realisation of this promising but expensive and technically challenging work. Or, for that matter, to franchising.

The Telkom saga continues: while they actually installed my dad's phone line on Thursday, we've been unable to phone any international numbers. When I phoned the helpline to report the fault, they told me, in tones of dulcet surprise, that oh, no! of course you can't get international lines, they're automatically locked with a new phone, and you need to have them unlocked. No, of course you can't do it via the helpline, you need to go into the Telkom Direct store and do it in person. No, of course no-one in any of the five different discussions you had with helplines and the store before installing the line actually mentioned this. That would constitute service, which runs counter to everything Telkom stands for.

Bastards. Also open to grant offers which would enable me to employ ninja assassins, preferably with a wholesale option.

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¹ Or "Japanese".