How I Spent My Summer Vacation

For the last two weeks, I've spent my summer coughing -- hacking, hawking, and coughing, coughing, coughing like a road company Camille, downing liquids, pills, lozenges until I don't know if it's the cough or the cure that's leaving me helpless. In the meantime dead leaves are piling to autumnal depths in my driveway, the backyard is littered with rose petals like a Spanish city on Corpus Christi, and my heirloom tomatoes need me, dammit. That's just outside the house, which, I've recently noticed, really needs to be painted. The inside is in worse shape. I had a whole bunch of entries planned, but they'll have to wait until this thing passes. In the meantime I've been lying around watching the Ring Cycle on DVD (the Barenboim/Kupfer one from Bayreuth -- since I was there last summer, I thought I'd re-live the excitement). Between my coughing, loudly unwrapping lozenges, and the phone ringing tinnily downstairs, it's almost exactly like being in a real opera house! I pause sometimes to glare at myself for my lack of courtesy.