I fell ill yesterday. I’d been suffering from an incessantly leaky nose and a persistent headache with lethargy. We’d planned to go explore Madison and meet up with friends yesterday. Thing is, our friends who live near Madison have a child who has some extraordinary medical needs, and I feared that his immune system might have suffered as a result. Sure enough, The Wife called to verify this and found that indeed, he is susceptible to infection to a much greater degree than other eighteen-month-olds, so he needs to be away from people who might pass along a cold or something like that.
So I stayed in the strangely-humid hotel room and watched TV all day while filling hotel Kleenex with prodigious amounts of mucous. And because the hotel’s internet server was down, I could not even blog or keep up on news the way I would have preferred. So I read and watched TV and played the silly games on The Wife’s laptop. Even now, the server at the hotel is not active, so here I sit (feeling much better now, thank you) in Barnes & Noble at Brookfield Square, having paid for temporary internet access.
I feel better for having had some down time. Before leaving on this “vacation,” it was a lot of stress and running around. And once we got here, there turns out to be some running around also. A brief period of actual rest is important, too.
We shopped Brookfield Square for after-Christmas sales every year when we visited relatives in Menomonee Falls. Northridge and Mayfair were two other malls we haunted. I forget which, but one had a large indoor ice rink and we’d watch the holiday shoppers become skaters. I looked forward to those malls every year because we had nothing of the sort in the U.P.