I’m feeling better (well enough, in fact, to blog!) and thought I’d give my millions of devoted readers (both of you; did I mention I had two million readers? Well, two million people of whom one point seven came here looking for Beaver Shots and went away confused, which is something, anyway) some clue as to what I’ve been going through.

As happens each year at the turning of the seasons, when the sun looks at Vancouver and turns, in fact, away completely, tossing a heartless “see you in May” over its shoulder as it heads to California, the rains have set in and that means that the mold, the mildew, the emos and the creepy-crawlies are ascendant.

All of these, with the exception of emos (because I hate clove cigarettes) can, according to my doctor, be found in my lungs at the present time.

My lungs, in fact, look something like this:

The fungus Pilobolus fires off its sporangiophore using a water cannon or “squirt gun,” reaching accelerations that are among the fastest in nature.

Here we present a montage of high-speed video clips showing sporangiophore discharge in the fungus Pilobolus kleinii. The videos were obtained at camera frame rates of up to 250,000 fps. Each discharge is completed in less than 0.25 milliseconds; an eye blink takes 100 milliseconds, or 400 times longer! The music is Verdi’s Anvil Chorus.

For more information, click here.

Anvil Chorus and all.

Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention that yesterday, when I sat down to blog, I was bitten on the ass by an Aggressive House Spider. They don’t call them that for nothing, and that was the reason I ended up smearing toothpaste on my butt at two in the morning.

What? What? It draws the poison out.

Although the Co-op where I live has improved things somewhat in the last year, tacking a new roof on so the water hardly ever wells up through my carpet anymore and disposing of the large areas of ceiling which had rotted through and caved in on the second floor (it’s a four-story building) and even carting away some of the drywall in the lobby where the mildew had eaten through, things here cannot be said to be spore-free.

And my lungs, scarred by some mystery illness when I was a baby, have never been the best (every time I get a chest X-ray they look all concerned until I say “oh, is this about the scar tissue? Check the records”). And there is, as there always is, a flu/cold/virus of doom going around Vancouver which knocks everyone on their asses for a week or so.

And so.

Put all these things together and you get someone who’s been running a temperature for nearly three weeks, appears to be unable to fully digest food of any kind, has essentially no appetite, produces her own body weight in mucus every eighteen hours, and coughs like that guy…that guy at the theatre…that one everyone hated by fifteen minutes into the flick. If I ever get this money I’m owed, I’m trotting straight down to Canadian Tire and buying one of those combo heater/dehumidifiers/air filters, and there goes three hundred bucks but it’s worth it.

Which is why I’m staying home tonight instead of going out to a social activist/geek event three blocks from my house featuring free booze.

Yes. I said free booze.

That’s how sick I am.