Fever

Last night, I went to bed with cold chills. Sure, the climate out here has been frigid, but a warming trend started yesterday... and besides, I had my heater going full blast. No, the cold was coming from within. My third illness this winter, a personal record. This time, the bug didn't mess around with sniffles or a scratchy throat. It made a full frontal assault on my system, and in no time, a full-scale battle raged.

Around midnight, I woke up sweating, with a head swimming in delirium. I took my temperature: 101.5. Popping some aspirin and downing a glass of water, I fell back into a fitful sleep. Around four in the morning, I woke up in a pool of sweat. The fever had broken, and I felt marginally better. I imagined myself as a battlefield after a major clash between the invading hordes of common cold virii and my defending antibodies, the field of battle drenched in sweat instead of blood.

Skirmishes are still popping up here and there in the "Kingdom of Strickland," but hopefully my body will win the war -- sooner rather than later, since I'm due to be scuba diving in Cozumel a week from today.

Vermin

I sit at my desk here in my new apartment, typing away at my computer (I'm working from home today). Between me and the window are piles of boxes that I have yet to unpack. Suddenly, I hear little rattling, crackling sounds, like something rustling around in papers. I groan inwardly. With all the other challenges I've faced since moving in, do I also have a vermin problem to deal with? Am I hearing bugs or mice crawling around inside my boxes? I creep closer to the boxes to listen more closely, trying to remain stealthy so whatever is making the noise doesn't hear me. But the sound suddenly stops. Like a cricket that stops chirping at your approach, whatever it is must have heard me coming.

But there it is again. It's coming from near the window. Or the window sill itself? Maybe it's some kind of insect crawling around in the crack beneath the window and the sill? I move closer still, crane my neck to listen. A smile spreads across my face as sheepish recognition dawns on me. What I'm hearing is the sound of small hail pellets hitting the window! Duh!

Thankfully, no bug problem here -- at least not yet, not in wintertime. I've dealt with my share of vermin in the past.... There were the roof rats in Carmel Mountain; I killed ten of them over as many nights with traps before the problem finally went away. At my beach apartment in San Diego, scores of termites emerged from a hole they'd eaten through in the window sill. Coming home to find your window covered with winged insects is not a pleasant experience. And then there was my dorm room at USC... I scratched an itch on my face as I slept one night, and woke to find a dead cockroach in bed with me. So it wasn't an itch after all.

Hopefully this place will remain vermin-free when the weather warms up and the humidity rises.

Baja

When I find myself enduring a particularly hectic workday or other stressful situation, my mind sometimes conjures up fanciful memories, unbidden, from my subconscious. They appear suddenly and explosively, like Molotov cocktail daydreams hurled by hidden revolutionaries in a mind occupied by an invading army of stress. Yesterday, as I sat at my desk at the end of a long week full of angst caused more by my new landlord than my boss, wayward images from Baja California kept popping into my head, distracting me from the present dull reality with colorful flashes from the past. Trips to Tijuana with friends, sucking down tequila shots before any of us were of legal drinking age in the U.S. Squinting through clouds of dust as I watched trophy trucks and buggies barrel down dirt roads during the Baja 500 race. Wolfing down 50-cent street tacos on a hot summer day and washing them down with an ice-cold Dos Equis. Riding horses down the sand of Rosarito Beach, passing a bottle of Sambuca back and forth. Diving on piedra ahogada ("drowned rock") at La Bufadora, a pinnacle rising from 100 feet to just below the surface. No matter the stress that everyday life may throw at me, I will always have fond memories of Baja to put a smile on my face (and I hope to create more Mexican memories when I go to Cozumel in three weeks).

Snow

It finally snowed last night. Already February, and this is the first real snow, other than a minor dusting a couple of weeks ago. And yet my father still calls global warming a "theory." (But that's a whole other debate that goes beyond the scope of this blog.) As I walked to work today, the uncommon sight of sunshine glinting off fresh snow stirred up thoughts of skiing. For someone like me who didn't grow up with real winters, memories of snow are forever intertwined with memories of ski trips. No past experiences of commuting through ice and dirty slush, no episodes of trudging through snowbanks to get to school, just recollections of good times playing in the white stuff. So today, while countless drivers gritted their teeth against the painful commute, I walked on with a smile on my face.

Neoprene

Recently, I drove with my wetsuits piled into the back of my SUV. As I went down the road, I suddenly caught a whiff of the neoprene. The scent had an immediate effect, taking me away in my mind to the deck of a dive boat, salty breeze blowing through my hair... to the tired satisfaction of wading through the surf after a dive well done, letting the swells push you toward shore... to the barks of sea lions, impatient for you to get in the water so they can play with you.... The smell of neoprene has become synonymous with the ocean and diving, so I need only catch a whiff to take a dive trip in my mind.