Bleah.

I have a horrendous cold. Weirdly, it started in my chest and has mostly stayed there - I have a little nasal congestion, but mostly a cough, a raw throat, and a dreadful case of fatigue. I think yesterday was probably the peak; I was up half the night either coughing or listening to Alex cough over the baby monitor. Because naturally we both get sick at once. Mercifully, Michael had the damn thing last week and is feeling mostly better.

"I wish I could stay home," I told him last night, "but we have an abstract deadline coming up next week, and if I don't get the data analysis done tomorrow I don't know when I'll have time to do it."

Actually, it didn't sound too bad: a day of peaceful, quiet work at my desk - too germy to be expected to go anywhere near patients - with no cranky, sick baby to deal with and an endless supply of lemon-ginger tea.

So of course, this morning, it was bucketing down rain. And my bus was ten minutes late. Even my golf umbrella wasn't up to the contingency. My shoes are so hopelessly soaked I have taken them off. I wish I could do the same with the chilly wet denim clinging to my knees and calves. Even my shirt has big wet patches from the brief interval between stepping off the bus and getting my umbrella open.

At least the thing about wet feet and colds is just a myth.

Purity gone WILD.

My mom is on vacation in Colorado right now, reading her e-mail at the Estes Park Public Library. A few days ago, I sent her an e-mail with a cute little anecdote about Alex. When she replied, I noticed something very strange about the quoted text of my message:

The other thing she loves to do lately is make her toys cry, and then give them to me to comfort. Doll, doggy, little plastic figurines, rubber ducks, they all start going "Waah! Waah!" and then I have to hug them. This reached its most ridiculous point when I gave her some goldfish ers to eat and she made the ers cry. I am not going to hug a er that's about to be food!

What the hell? Had I made some sort of bizarre error?

...No. A quick check of my sent mail folder indicated that I had made no typing or cut-and-paste error. I had clearly specified that the ritual played out with goldfish CRACKers. CRACKers.

Holy shit. And I thought net filters that disallowed the phrase "breast cancer" were bad.

Whoever set up those filters - and it must be the library, right? Because if Yahoo, my mother's mail service provider, were being so idiotic, it would be on the news - is the craziest Puritan I've ever encountered. Can't have library users talking about illegal drug use, so the letters c-r-a-c-k are forbidden, even if those nasty druggies attempt to disguise them by following them up with -e-r-s. But wait, it gets better: I e-mailed my mom about the deletion, and she wrote back:

Talk to [your sister]. She has had several email where the common word for female babies was omitted, when sent to me. baby. Did it work?

Girl. They forbid internet users from viewing the word GIRL.

What. The. Hell. Those computers must be completely fucking unusable. I wonder if the librarians' machines have the same filters.

Edited to add: I just checked another e-mail from my mother to see what else had been edited out of my quoted text. "Game." WTF? I guess because they don't want people using library computers to play games? But that makes no sense!