--Mark Twain

I have a cold.

At least, I think it's a cold. I'm definitely down with something, and "cold" is what comes to mind as the most likely culprit. My throat hurts, but not way down in the throat, just up top, and the day's first nasal effluvium was yellow (rule of thumb: clear=allergies, yellow=cold, green=infection), so a cold it appears to be. Although it occurs to me that if mucus color were a foolproof test, there'd be no need for throat cultures.

Now that I've provided Too Much Information on the state of my health, I ought to grant that this was incipient yesterday, and fully manifest only today, so this is not the only reason why it's taken me almost a week to update this journal. There has been a long list of reasons for that, which can be summed up by the phrase "Real Life."

Let's see...

Then I got up, opened my text editor, and proceeded to code for the next four hours, at the end of which I actually had a halfway decent draft of a prototype of a skeleton for the site.

Went to college, showed said draft to the other person working on it, and it was well-recieved. I'm still gonna have to change almost everything, but it's a good start.

Not long after the start of class, we were all told to get on the stage and lie down. "Oh, good," I said to whichever classmates happened to be within earshot. "Wake me up when we're done." Upon which, I curled up comfortably, closed my eyes, and lay there with a blissful smile. This only lasted a minute or two, though; we were then told to lie on our backs and follow a series of instructions, tensing and untensing various muscles in a relaxing exercise. It seemed to help, though; I wasn't quite as zonked after that.

(While, for the most part, I just followed the instructions and kept my mouth shut, I did feel compelled to make one exception. We were asked to think back to a childhood moment in which we felt really happy. "How did you feel as a child?" she rhetorically asked. "Pretty depressed, actually," I answered. "Shhh," she replied. But I still haven't been able to think of a suitable moment.)

Other highlights of the class included a game of "Duck, Duck, Goose," which broke down because the rules weren't explained, and I didn't know them; and a series of "phone conversations" in which various classmates tried to get favors out of various other classmates. (I was on the receiving end right at the start, and had more than a little fun holding the line.)

Checked my e-mail, and discovered that, in point of fact, I could attend the Best American Erotica reading that night. Problem was, due to a wide variety of complications, I didn't find out any further in advance. As it stood, I could just barely make it in time if I hustled, and I wasn't really up to hustling.

What decided the matter was that I couldn't get hold of the other CS staffer who would theoretically be going with me, neither by e-mail nor by phone... so, under the circumstances, I regretfully plodded home and went to sleep, after e-mailing yet another staffer to let him know that I'd be missing that week's chat.

Identified a bunch of minerals. In most cases, this was done by scratching them, estimating their weight, and looking at them, but a couple were settled by licking them. This made halite (AKA sodium chloride, AKA table salt) really obvious, for instance.

Where this fits into the fact that I'm usually paranoid about what I put into my mouth is an interesting question.

Where this fits into the fact that I now have a cold is another interesting question.

So the whole family trooped down to Woodmere for Shabbos, and it was nice.

Which is not to say that I've been nothing but productive. The past week has also featured several unsuccessful attempts at getting past Level 23 of Snood, and, over the past day or so, a number of online games of Trivial Pursuit. The latter, despite some flaky software, has the potential to get as addictive as the former.

Oh, and my "down arrow" key has been sticking lately, and I don't know what, if anything, I can do about it. Aside from switching to my numeric keypad, that is.

It's a pity, though; the nominees deserve better.

Finish Roxana. Write a column and a review for the college paper. Do various work for Clean Sheets. Recode the American Studies website. Write about a random stranger or two and memorize a short scene for acting class. Do my geology homework. Speak to the Bursar--

Oh, gosh, I forgot to tell you about that.

It seems that I'm being charged more than three hundred bucks for the Urban Studies class I dropped; it seems that you can't trade classes between departments once the semester's underway without paying for the first one.

Ironically, I received a check for $1,440 the following day, which I shouldn't be getting. A call to the Bursar revealed that this was a refund for last semester, 'cause my state financial aid came in, but I wasn't eligible for state financial aid last year. Our letters crossed in the mail. So now I have to convince them to refund the $300+ for this semester, while simultaneously getting them to take back the $1,440. Fun.

• Ally McBeal
• The Nanny

There must be more. Any nominations?

It seems that some new information about the groom on Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire has come to light, including the fact that an ex-fiancee of his got a restraining order against him.

Fox's response? "In light of that new information, the network feels that to rebroadcast the special would be inappropriate and consequently, we have removed it from our schedule."

What, they'd really thought it was appropriate until now?