When It's Gone
Saturday. Whereas last weekend there were festivals and parades aplenty in Berkeley and San Francisco, this weekend there are none and I am planning to spend the time taking care of this lingering cough (the flu or whatever it is) that I've now had for these last ten days, that continues to diminish, but ever so slowly, ever so slowly, as I sit here at this computer after breakfast, sweating like a pig.
Sweating like a pig?
Sitting here feeling overly warm and damp, as if a warm water mist was waiting to make a break through my pores. The tail end of this thing, in other words: a thing I get every year or two around this time in the fall, winter approaching, head full of cotton, not quite able to lie down without coughing, here in Oakland. One day, when I am older (one hopes much older) it will no doubt kill me, but not this year, it seems, unless the bird flu now percolating in Asia reaches us before the end of December.
OK. Which explains the fact you haven't posted in a while.
I actually wrote an horrendously long political polemic a week ago Sunday just before this flu thing started and it's been sitting needing a rewrite for these last almost two weeks. And I don't give a shit, but I don't give a shit in a kind of laid back, life goes on, who gives a damn sort of a way that doesn't lend itself to self recrimination, let alone effort of any kind.
Art & Life had another three day blizzard of hits in the middle of this week, maybe ten times what it normally gets on a daily basis. Looking at the referral logs I can't see the reason. All of them are from the MSN search engine, but they're searches on words and phrases I don't include in my site description. I wonder if MSN is futzing with their algorithms? Messing with their filters? Forgetting to flip a switch on Wednesdays that causes some internal glitch which brings me random traffic.
Are you a traffic slut? Are you secretly hoping for visibility?
Everybody's a traffic slut. It would be too embarrassing to deny it. Still, curious. Not unlike all those folks who come here looking for information on starting a business.
I've gone back to the standard width column designed years ago to fit on a 640 x 480 screen, even though everyone has bumped their resolution up to 1024 x 768 and beyond. There's probably some correlation here with age. You get older and crankier and set in your ways. I do have a screen I test these on, though, a Dell 19” flat panel and it sure does look larger when it's, um, larger, now doesn't it? Perhaps it's this lingering cough putting me off and I will think it through again when it's gone.
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