Craig Berry

I came down with the flu last Wednesday.  Given all the news coverage, it's hard not to think "OMG swine flu!", but I'm reasonably sure it's just regular old flu.  I'm calling it "piglet flu" -- like swine flu, only smaller.

My recovery process was not helped by the fact that I had about 14 hours of continuous work to do on Saturday, as we installed the new Master at Star Sapphire Lodge.  I can sometimes make a deal with my body where I fake being well for a day or so, with the accumulated sickness debt coming due when I'm done.  I pulled off that trick on Saturday, thank goodness, but oh boy, was there a high balance due come Sunday.

However, the event was well worth it.  The Lodge was jammed, with just about all the locals as well as a healthy contingent from Orange County in attendance.  We used a further-modified version of Fr. Dionysus's adaptation of a Masonic Lodge Master installation ritual, which is like a candy store for us ritual pomp-and-circumstance fans.  There were tears, laughter, and love in overwhelming abundance.  I think we got this thing started just right. 

Now I'm back at work, sniffling, achey, tired...and smiling.  That works for me.

 So, how many geek points do I get for this?  I just received a fundraising email from the DNC (or some surrogate group) titled "McCain campaign attacks you", and I couldn't help muttering "In Soviet Russia..."

I'm feeling somewhat better, as evidenced by the fact that I decided to walk the last mile home this evening, rather than waiting to transfer to the local bus that stops a block from my house.  I always feel a little silly taking that bus for three stops, anyway, but feeling as I have recently I've been glad to do so.  Tonight it was crisply cool and breezy, and my energy level was suddenly back to something like normal, so I reverted to pedestrian normalcy.  By the time I got home I could definitely feel that some of that energy had been illusory, but still, I like the trend.

Despite my lingering head cold, it was a fun and active weekend.  Saturday evening, I had some friends over to watch Dark Star, John Carpenter's first film (it started out as his film-school project before being remade as a feature film).  Dark Star is a wonderfully bleak comedy about four bitter, bored astronauts who've spent far too many years cooped up together in a malfunctioning starship.  I'm not going to drop any spoilers, but any amateur (or professional) philosophers among my readers must see this movie.

The on Sunday I headed up to LVX to celebrate Mass with the lovely ardras156 .  Attendance was light, but I was in the mood for a cozy little Mass, so that worked out nicely.  And the ceremony itself was wonderful -- it was the first time she and I had worked together, after about a year of meaning to do so, and the wait was well worth it.  I even forgot I had a cold for that hour.

Now I need to turn my attention to preparing for Kaaba in Ogden this coming weekend.  I could use some rest, but that seems not to be in the cards.  Ah, well, at least I don't get bored. :)

 

 Well, my slight blah yesterday turned into a full-on head cold by the time I woke up this morning.  I stayed home to rest and fight it off.

This has left me with plenty of time to wander the web.  Here's a wonderful parody of "Every Breath You Take", which I'll dedicate to my economic-policy sparring partner fraterseraphino .  A little context:  The video was made at Columbia Business School (CBS), and the lead singer is portraying Glenn Hubbard, the dean of CBS, who was on the short list to succeed Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve; Bernanke got the position instead.

Happy π day! I will be sharing a round dinner -- pizza, Key Lime pie, wine in circular glasses -- with my friend Merri this evening. She showed her true geek-girl colors by noting we should really meet for a late lunch at 1:59 instead.

I've almost recovered from the Gnostic Death Flu. I'm still coughing and sneezing a little, and feeling a little draggy (especially while trying to get up in the morning, even after adequate sleep). But my overall energy is nearly back to normal, I'm no longer feverish at all, and I haven't needed Nyquil to sleep for the last several nights. I'm hoping this improvement means I can safely attend a St. Patrick's (pre-)Day party tomorrow evening; I need a little fun-and-relaxation-with-friends time. The day following I'm serving as Child for the Mass at LVX Lodge, and the day after that I have a fairly important appointment for which I want to be in top mental shape, so I'm proceeding with unusual caution, even for me.

I'm very glad I canceled the class I was supposed to teach today; I'm feeling better than yesterday, but not by much.  When it takes an effort of will to stand up and walk to the refrigerator to get juice, it's probably not the day to be teaching for four hours.  I finally got several hours of deep, restful sleep this morning, which seems to have helped.

Thanks to all who have provided sympathy, and to those of you who also have this flu...hang in there.

Like just about everyone I know who was at Massathon last weekend for more than a few hours, I have come down with the flu.  It's not horrible, but it's bad enough that I've missed two days of work this week.  I suppose there's a price to be paid for everything.

Last night we held the first Gnostic Boot Camp session at Blue Horizon Oasis; until now, they've always been at LVX Lodge.  From now on we'll be doing them at the two location in alternating months.  magdalena_lvx was supposed to give a presentation on Pythagoras, but she got sick -- on her birthday, no less! -- and couldn't make it.  Get well soon!  But we had great fun with the presentations on Roger Bacon by JB (he of no LJ) and Melchizedek by maeghanne.  Both led to good discussions about relevant subjects -- the idea of empirical theology for Bacon, and the nature of priesthood for Melchizedek.

Then, in the free time where Pythagoras was supposed to go, I instead launched a discussion on how to prevent creeping rigidity and hidden assumptions from limiting our understanding of the Mass.  Just for example, the ritual refers to the Positive and Negative Child, but almost universally, they are called the "Fire Child" and the "Water Child".  But doesn't this neglect half of each of their formulae?  The Positive Child, after all, combines fire and air, and the Negative, water and earth.  Using the easy shorthand risks falling into a Korzybskian trap of letting our imprecise use of words limit and distort our thoughts.  And, indeed, many local traditions involve fire and water visualizations for the Children, with no explicit inclusion of earth or air.  We found many more examples of how casual shorthand language and local traditions can insidiously become dogma, and discussed ways of detecting and preventing this syndrome.  I'm very happy to have gotten people thinking about this.

Meanwhile, I'm still sick, but gradually getting better.  I slept very soundly last night, which was nice.  I felt like I could have slept another twelve hours when the alarm went off, but it was not to be.  I can sleep in both days this weekend, which should help me finish this flu off at long last.

The bad news: I still have the Death Flu.  I'm getting better, slooowly, but I still feel that icky-feverish-sluggish-blah combination that set in more than a week ago.  I'm supposed to be doing a complicated software design, and I can barely summon the energy to yawn.  This is not a good thing.  Immune system, come on, let's get on the case!

The good news: I have my plane tickets and hotel booked for Kaaba Colloquium in Houston, December 1-2.  My OTO friends are invited to join me and the rest of the Kaaba gang for the most fun you'll ever have at a leadership training seminar.  I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone can shut me down as thoroughly as ihateswine did in Minneapolis during the mediation role-play exercise.

The other good news: Despite both of us being sick, laurellady and I had a pretty good Halloween night.  We put out a small fraction of her vast storehouse of Halloween decor, ordered in dinner, and watched The Rites of Dracula (a Hammer classic with the incomparable Christopher Lee as the Count), the original Haunting of Hill House, and the beginning of Night of the Living Dead.

LA area folks, the LVX Lodge ad for our upcoming "Ceremonial Magick 101" class started running in today's issue of the LA Weekly. It's just a text ad, but it's prominently listed in the events bulletin board section, one of just four items in the "workshops and seminars" category. I'm really looking forward to seeing how well this works.

I saw this issue at lunchtime, when I was out at an optometry appointment. This was with a new doctor (my old optometry office having closed last year). As many of you know, my eyes are extremely weird...so weird that most optometrists and ophthalmologists don't even know that the syndrome exists. So the poor unsuspecting guy shakes my hand and asks "So, how are your eyes doing?" And I reply "Strangely, as usual" and launch into the tale.

He turns out to be a very engaging and curious guy, so we proceed to tick off the four patients waiting behind me while he takes his time checking my eyes. His first look at my eyes through a magnifier literally made him gasp. He rapidly established that none of his automated optometry gear even recognized my eyes as being eyes, and we regressed to the tried-and-true "eye chart and flippy lens experimentation" technique to determine my prescription, and the "thumbs pressing closed eyelids" to gauge my ocular pressure. I admire adaptability like that. Everything looks good; he was even able to correct my prescription for reading to nearly 20/60, better than my usual 20/80.

As he came to appreciate how weird my eyes really are, he asked who had done my early treatments, which included hormone therapy and surgery. I replied "A specialist named Doctor Fine in San Francisco", and he looked stunned, and remarked that Fine was regarded as a demigod within the profession, author of several standard reference works, and mentor to a large fraction of the current leading eye specialists. Then I replied that my memories of him from early childhood were of a very small, very funny guy who would always answer my questions patiently.

He nearly fell over. "Fine examined you himself? That's -- that's like saying Albert Einstein came over to fix your light switch!" Apparently demigods more commonly leave examinations to their associates, but I was too unusual for him to pass up the chance to see me personally.

I called my mom afterward to share this story, and she told me she physically picked Dr. Fine up and swung him around in the air, whooping, when he reported that I had developed a pupil (and with it some vision) when I was six months old. It's not often you get to do that to a living legend. :)

Discussion of medical stuff with a minor ick factor lies beyond the cut.  You have been warned.

A piece of consummate geek humor has been running through my mind today, as I work on enabling automatic email generation from within my day-job application. I believe I first saw this as an email signature on a tech mailing list:

This is a multipart message in MIME format.
The message is trying to escape from an invisible box.
The message is walking into a strong wind.

Anyone who gets that is a geek. Sorry if this comes as a shock to any of you.

I'm starting off a very busy stretch at a disadvantage, as I had some kind of food poisoning yesterday, and I still feel drained. But I can't miss any work, and every evening this week except Friday is booked, as are both days of the weekend. Hopefully my body will complete its bounce back to full health by tomorrow; I can't afford to be dragging right now.

Up until now, I've miraculously avoided getting sick this season, despite all the virulent bugs swarming about. Well, even miracles have time limits, apparently. I've been fighting a head cold the last couple of days. I stayed home from work both days. Ordinarily, I might have gone in feeling as I do, but things are quiet at the office and I haven't taken sick time for a while, so I decided to do my body a favor and rest, while also avoiding the chilly bus trips to and fro.

So far it's neither going away nor getting worse. I'll probably go into work tomorrow if it's still holding steady. A sudden recovery during the night would be most welcome, of course.

Meanwhile, here's my silly noble title, courtesy of the latest meme:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Very Lord Craig the Antique of Piddletrenthide on the Carpet Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

I imagine that "Piddletrenthide" is probably pronounced "PIN-hud".

Hats off to Wikipedia for assisting me with that title.

I'm preparing for my trip to Orlando later this week, and everyone around me is succumbing to various colds and flus, including laurellady and madelineusher. I thought I was joining the afflicted list on Saturday, but seem to have fought it off. Of course, that was before the plague spread to my own household. Now every slight scratchiness in the back of my throat, every feeling of being a little too tired, has me worried. There are few things I hate worse than air travel with even a mild illness, and travel to Orlando is a loooong trip in a cheap airline seat. I don't deal with that well even when I'm at my most chipper.

So, any health-protection mojo anyone cares to throw my way would be most appreciated.

This morning I started in on the ramped-up exercise regime: 20 pushups per day like last month, with 60 situps per day added. Both are broken up into two equal sets, first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. Lying on a cold floor at 5:20am struggling through 30 situps should earn me some kind of willpower medal.

As was the case when I started with the pushups, my form sucked. By the time I got past the first ten I had to use my arms to help a little with the lifting. My view is it's better to stick to the count and improve the form as I can than to drop the count, and it worked well with the pushups.

Now my abdominal muscles are urgently and continuously reporting that they had to work too hard this morning, with the obvious subtext that they would like me to stop doing stupid things like sitting up 30 times in a row. My response to these flabby, slacker muscles is that if they did a better job of holding my gut in, they wouldn't be in this much trouble; and just wait until they see what 30 more at eleven tonight feel like.

I hope having arguments with one's own body parts isn't a bad sign.

Lately I've been having more trouble than usual with memorizing material. A lot of what I do in OTO depends on this ability, so this is a matter of some concern to me. Over this past weekend I had two OTO events which required significant memorization, and I wasn't happy with my performance at either of them, despite having put in more preparation time than I typically would have allocated for the amount of material involved. I could tell that the text wasn't sticking in my head as well as it should, which is why I bumped up the prep effort. I hesitate to think what would have happened without that extra work.

Now I'm left wondering what's up with my brain. It could be a transient effect of some kind, due to stress or a mild infection or whatnot. It could even be connected in some weird way to my taking up regular exercise a month ago; maybe there's something to the "dumb jock" archetype after all. :) I don't think it's an aging effect, as I'm only 44 (or, as I prefer to think of it, in my late 20s in hex notation). Whatever it is, I'm going to be monitoring it closely. If my memory doesn't bounce back to normal on its own by New Years, I'll start experimenting with the various herbal supplements reputed to be beneficial in this regard.

Thanks to the gentle persuasion of selyndria, I'm in better shape now than I was on October 1. She challenged a group of her friends to do 500 pushups in October, and I was just drunk enough to take her up on it...and I've stuck to it, which is effectively a first since college for me on an exercise plan. I've been doing ten pushups in the morning and ten before bed like clockwork since the morning of 10/2, which means that the set of ten I'll be doing in about half an hour will bring me to the magic 500 mark. I'm going to keep doing them through the end of the month anyway.

And then I'm going to keep doing them in November, along with 30 situps or crunches each morning and evening, to comfortably exceed two elements of her new challenge. I'm going to leave the third element, cardio conditioning, until December; one reason I think I've succeeded this month was that the commitment was small enough not to be too daunting, so I want to layer things on gradually.

It's really quite amazing that after just a month of relatively modest exercise I can feel the different shape and size of my biceps, and do pushups in good form far more easily than when I started. My abdominal muscles are also noticeably firmer, though I'm sure that will accelerate a lot in November. There's a lot to be said for starting from an utterly pathetic state; progress is very rapid once you start doing anything about the situation.

As of this morning I've completed 170 of the 500 pushups selyndria's pledge system has me signed up for in October. I'm doing two sets of ten each day, morning and night. The great advantage of starting from a miserably bad place is that progress is rapid. The first couple of days, I couldn't even complete all ten in proper form; now I start having to pause and collect my willpower after the sixth or so, but I'm doing all ten the right way, back and legs straight, whole body coming up at once. An unexpected benefit is that, along with my arm muscles, my stomach muscles are really feeling this -- and I am most of the way to dropping a belt notch as a result. So, thank you, selyndria, for getting me off my ass and onto my stomach. :)

Next month, I've already decided to continue this, and add situps. It's about time I was able to stop worrying about my paunch. Life is too short.

Despite the continuing siege of my immune system by a low-grade but annoying flu, class at LVX went quite well last night.  Attendance was better than I'd expected; the topic "Holy Books" didn't seem to have the pizzazz of, say, "The Myths of Quetzalcoatl" or even "Astronomology", but I've learned I am incapable of predicting how popular my classes will be.  People seemed happy (and, better, curious) at the end of this one, so I'll score it as a win.  Having braums show up was a nice bonus (he's in town on a business trip this week).

I think I may be feeling a little better today.  I hope so, because I have a very full weekend planned.

Yesterday afternoon I began feeling listless, depressed, unfocused, and generally out of sorts.  I worried that all the stress of the last few weeks had finally gotten to me.

This morning I woke up with a sore throat and that slightly dizzy feverish sensation that signals the onset of a minor case of the flu.  It's weird being relieved to have the flu, but I am; better that than having my psychological defenses collapse.

Ironically, being sick enough to stay home from work but not very sick has allowed me to catch up on a backlog of other projects (after I slept until nearly noon).