(My first thought is that the syncronized onset means that it's something you ate. Is there something you and Nancy noshed on that PNH and Elric didn't?)

Arrrgh--hope you get well soon. If you are worried about weight loss, put honey in and on everything. That's what we are doing with David.

Or if you are thankful for it, capitalize AFTER you get well. My friend Leslea makes great chicken soup. I send it virtually down there to you.

xxxJane

Robert, I'm sorry to hear that you were sick too. Are your eyes okay? I'm vaguely under the impression that hurlathons (as you so delicately put it) are hard on intraocular pressure.

Jane, it's been years since I've had to worry about my weight being too low. Back then, I kept a stash of Dove Bars in the freezer, ready to hand for those moments when food seemed like a non-alien idea.

David losing weight, oy. It's not like he had any to spare. Give him my love.

That John Varley future with the really great medicine is definitely overdue.

Somehow, that phrase, stunning bursts of bloggy energy, sounds almost like a relapse of what you just had.

Here in Toronto, we had one ER closed down for all but the direst of emergencies because of the bug. For some reasons, all the first radio reports kept calling the affliction Winter Vomiting Disease, although after a day they went for the more sedate "Norwalk-like virus". After a quick look at Google, it seems that WVD is used most often in Britain and the Commonwealth, although a few American sites used it, too. More of that famed Brit bluntness about the body and its dysfunctions, I guess.

There are ways to lose weight, and WAYS to lose weight, and radiation or WVD are not on the Good List.

Jane

I had what I believe was the original Norwalk Virus a long time ago; I think it was during the outbreak that earned it its name. Perhaps it was that, maybe it was getting my flu shot nice and early that helped stave off the worst of the symptoms -- I am optimistically assuming that I've already done my course of WVD.

If you are ever in similar circumstances and need help, please feel free to call on me. I learned to puke with efficiency, if not decorum, a few years ago, and would happily risk it for close friends or in response to strong need.

I hope that your and Nancy's recoveries are swift and complete.

Teresa, if you're up to reading comics, I handed Patrick a copy of a Castle Waiting TPB yesterday.

Jane, I don't suppose you could use some jars of marmalade...?

Bob, food contamination usually makes itself felt sooner than that. Also -- and there's no adequately discreet way to say this -- while I met Saturday night's seafood once, in the restaurant, which was its proper place, I did not meet it twice. Nancy did, but her digestion is chronically slow.

I had far too much time to think about this question.

Just over a week later I had to deal with the first of two cases of chicken pox. Not a month to fondly remember.

hope you get to feel better.

I'm glad you're doing better. Really I am. Being Barf Buddies was not my idea of a Way To Bond. Oh, and -- we hope the mouse didn't ride home in your luggage. Did it?

I am somehow reminded by this discussion of the nonlethal gas weapon that James Blish invented for a scene in one of the Cities in Flight novels. IIRC, it induced vomiting, diarrhoea, mucosal discharge, and one or two other unpleasant effects. He called it "Polybathroomfloorite"

I find I'm similarly rather glad that so far as I know, none of you with the virus are particularly close to me, but I'll keep an eye out for people who have been traveling.

Was anybody hit by the winter storm I heard about this week?

A Canadian coworker and I traded off telling "this is nothing" stories, croggling the New Yorkers...one of my cos is from Trinidad, and her eyes got very, very big. "Bye," she commented. "I'm going home now!" and she did NOT mean her apartment in Brooklyn...

Another co spent his first five years in Leningrad, and he looked out at the snow not so much falling as flying down in billions of little kamikaze powerdives, and said "it was pretty much like this from October to March."

Jane

Volgograd (originally Tsaritsin) is a Russian city located on the Volga River about 500 miles south of Moscow, and thus about 750 miles south of Lenin. This far south, the Volga is a big and lazy river, more than a mile wide. Volgograd is at 48' N Latitude, about as far north as Winipeg or Paris.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, Volgograd was better known as Stalingrad. In September 1942, the German army attacked Stalingrad. The Soviets fought back tenaciously (eventually winning the war in the process, but that's not the point of this story though it's worth remembering). The battle dragged on for a month, then another month. The Soviets mostly threw infantry against a combined force of infantry and tanks, because the Soviets were backed up against the Volga with no way to get tanks across except for the ones they were making in the tractor factory in the city. (Another wonderful image: Later in the battle, tanks would roll off the assembly line at the STZ [Stalingrad Tractor Factory] fully manned and firing at the Germans on the factory floor.)

Towards the end of October, both the Germans and the Soviets had to start taking into consideration the fact that the Soviets would be able to get tanks more easily, because sometime in late October or early November, the Volga, which was already riddled with ice floes by early October, would freeze solid enough for tanks to drive across it.

Not "if". "When".

That's what Russian winters are like.

The Volcanic Two-Step has hit like a tidal wave out here, too. Definitely viral. And virulent. Third grade had, I'm reliably told, an Olympic champion six-desk hurler a week ago Friday.

Any suggestions for hastening its departure?

The next night, the guy's watching TV again, when there's a knock
at the door. He opens it, and it's the cockroach. This time the
cockroach gives him a couple of karate chops, kicks him in the
knee, then slams the door and leaves.

The next night, the guy's sitting watching TV when there's a knock
at the door. He opens it, and there's the cockroach. The roach
has a dagger, a pistol, a blackjack, and a set of brass knuckles,
and it starts beating the snot out of the guy. The guy's a bleeding mass
on the floor. When the roach leaves, the guy crawls to the phone, dials
911, and calls for an ambulance. He's taken to the emergency room, where
the doctor says, "What happened?" The guy says, "You'll never believe
this," and tells the story. The doc says, "Hmmm.... actually, we've been
seeing a lot of that lately. There's a nasty bug going around."

I like the bug joke Jim.