It might be H1N1 Swine Flu, I'm not sure.  My fever spike was not terrible and was over early.  A couple of nights in a row I woke up coughing a little and it felt like the air was too dry and I didn't think much about it.  Friday morning I went about my normal routine, but by Friday afternoon I was suddenly struck by a severe cold.  I had sneezing, and lots of mucus, body aches, headache, and general fatigue.  The symptoms continued through Saturday, and then included a fever.  It was a bad fever, but certainly not the worst I've had (which is what makes me wonder if I really have Swine Flu).  The fever broke Saturday night.  Sunday, although I felt fewer body aches I still had fatigue, and now a cough and sore throat.  From Friday through Monday I used up two large boxes of tissues with sneezing and a runny nose.  By Tuesday the sneezing had decreased to almost none, but I was still weak, shakey, and dizzy after standing for a while.  Today is Wednesday and in spite of plenty of rest and all my treatments, the symptoms seem to be in a holding pattern.  What makes me think this might be H1N1 Swine Flu is that the mucus in my lungs and sinuses is extremely thick and stretchy.  You could use it for glue.  It is definitely thicker and gluier than rubber cement, and yellowish.  What remains of this illness is a bad cough, congested lungs, and congested sinuses.

I started treatment as soon as the first symptoms that I identified as a "cold" appeared.  That was Friday afternoon.  I wish I had been a little more proactive and started treating when I woke up with a mild cough the two nights earlier.  I have a whole arsenal of "usual treatments" and I've been using all of them:  vitamin C megadoses, echinacea capsules and tea, ginger root tea, lemon eucalyptus cough drops, yin chiao, garlic in my ears to clear my eustachian tubes and chopped up garlic cloves swallowed raw, Theraflu tea, hot Vietnamese soup one day and hot Thai curry the next, and of course, rest.  But today I had a mucus block in my trachea that was so severe I wasn't sure I'd be able to break through to breathe.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of mucus so much as very thick mucus.

I just made a strong tea from fenugreek seed powder, cubeb berries, coltsfoot and marsh mallow leaves.  I remember having whole fenugreek seeds around the house but I think I fed them to the birds.  I ground the cubeb berries in my coffee grinder and would have done the same on the fenugreek seeds, too if I had whole ones.  Must be good for me, it tastes terrible.  It started working very quickly.  The mucus is thinning.  I would recommend at least 2 strong cups of this per day until totally symptom-free.

The Linux in-car mapping and navigation solution for using the USB GPS that comes with Microsoft's Streets and Trips is still the newest tech item on Alwanza gps_map.  I added my Easy Basil Pesto recipe.  Oh yeah, and I've been coding in Perl so much that it finally improved my Javascript.  I cleaned up the code on the home page that plays the 3 hidden midi files and stuffed it in an external file.  My aim is to make my site more "accessible" within the near future and doing that was part of it.

I'm continuing to work on the database-driven web application for NW NARGS.  I have almost all the functions completed and I've extracted two modules from it, cutting down to almost half its original 4,000 lines.

There are lots of things that I wanted to do that I haven't been able to get to yet:  tinkering on my bicycle, taking a RedHat Certification course, more outdoor exercise - to name three.  I'll have to redouble my efforts.

We harvested more than 2 dozen Italian prunes which were perfect and delicious.  We've also harvested lots of apples.  A few are still on the trees.  I got 3 pumpkins ranging from large to very small out of my pumpkin plants this year.  The squirrels enjoyed the sunflowers.  The red wigglers are doing well.  The trees are starting to turn color and the air is very cold in the morning.