Hey! You in the toga with the "Muse" tattoo!

Get back over here!

Or at least leave me some of those ideas you're scribbling on your notepad. I could use some right about now.

*insert sound of someone dropping a box of ten reams of paper into my lap*

Oh. Thanks.

I'll be back as soon as I sort through all of these things, folks, and get the growling about airline travel out of my system. I just got back from visiting Dr. Moreau and my brain's still settling itself.

Your scheduled annual superbug panic will start...NOW.

I know I'm coming in on the late end of things for the current brouhaha, but I doubt we've seen the last of the swine flu (or H1N1, or whatever its name has been changed to now. I've been up to my ears in notes, old assignments, and schedules, and haven't really paid attention beyond the pandemic level and the infectivity rate versus death toll. Mea culpa.) Still, maybe this will get people to sit up and pay attention to the fact that maybe we're not as invincible as we think.

I'm not terribly worried yet, even though my roommate sounds like she's going to hack up a lung, but I am keeping my eyes open and being a little more careful than usual. If it hits, there's nothing I could do but ride out the resultant cytokine storm and hope it doesn't kill me or leave me with brain damage. I'm remembering what I can about the 1918 pandemic, but it's not really helping. There's not much prevention mentioned in those accounts and too much of what went wrong.

And it seems that my paranoid streak finally came in handy. I have plenty of food and minor medicine (fever reducers, rubbing alcohol, and bandages) on hand if I can't go out for some reason. But I doubt it'll get as bad as the fall of 1918. I hope, rather.

In the meantime, I'll be occupying myself (between finals and other assorted junk) trying to exterminate the human race here:

Pandemic 2

And having fun reading old End of the World science fiction. I'm getting a little tired of fielding e-mails and calls from the phantom students who never attended the class I TA'd for.