Once more I haven't posted in a while. Let's see, what have I been up to?

Nothing much, truth be told.

My computer was sick for a bit - it kept shutting down completely at random (it didn't matter what I was doing, or even if I was doing anything or not). It was rather annoying, as you can imagine. I asked several knowledgeable online friends and acquaintances (I suspected it was a hardware component going the way of the dodo, and I'm not too experienced in troubleshooting hardware), and the almost unanymous opinion was that it was my power supply failing. So I bought a new one, swapped it in, and my computer's been behaving ever since. Phew.

Then I got sick for a week, which I largely spent wandering around the house being bored out of my skull and feeling sorry for myself. Then a week or so back at my java course, thoroughly enjoying learning fun programming stuff.

Then, one fateful Friday, my father came home from Portugal (he'd gone on a work-related trip), not feeling too well. The following Saturday we were supposed to go to the La Fenice theatre in Venice to see an opera ("Parsifal"); we'd booked ages in advance (back in August), but my father woke up coughing his lungs out and with a rather high fever so we ended up staying home. (Waste of money, grrr. And I'd been looking forward to the opera.)

The weekend was then spent nursing my sick father back to health (in the case of my mother) and/or staying the heck away from him (in the case of me and my brother).

On Monday morning, my mother woke up with the same symptoms my father had had.

In retrospect, I should've known I was doomed :P

That same day, my brother left for his week-long school trip (and managed not to get sick, the lucky sod).

On Tuesday, I woke up feeling like complete shit. I was coughing my lungs out, and I'd managed to sleep maybe an hour total because I kept waking up coughing during the night. I wanted to stay home, but I checked my temperature and I didn't have a fever - and following my family's "no fever, you aren't really sick" rule, I ended up going to my java course anyway.

It wasn't a particularly pleasant day for me - I spent it mostly coughing my lungs out, feeling like shit and being unable to concentrate. (And whining to my friends on IRC.) By the time I got on the train home, I was fully determined to fight tooth and nail for my right to stay home and rest the following day, even if I didn't have a fever.

Turns out I didn't have to :P I really should've expected it - I got home, declared "there's no way in hell I'm going anywhere tomorrow", checked my temperature just to be safe, and discovered I had a really high fever (38.7 °C, to be exact). I crawled my way downstairs to my computer, notified the few online friends I could track down, then crawled upstairs and curled up in bed. I spent the next couple days there, feeling sorry for myself, feeling like my brain was frying and too sick to even get bored. It was rather scary.

And so I spent another week sitting at home and being sick. :P

After that, not much else. Well, there was Chocolate Day 2005 Easter. Mmm, chocolate.