I am sick. Sick I am.

When I was young I was often sick. Sick many times during the course of a year, and sick for long periods. As an adult, I've been much more fortunate. This winter, however, I've been sick four times now. Five?

My throat has constricted and is now a narrow burning passage through which little air may pass. There's no sense eating, since the oxygen molecules can't even make it through my throat.

Will I stay home to rest though? Of course not. I can never rationalize doing so (especially since I stayed home one day a couple of weeks ago): staying home would cost me $112 in lost wages plus $50 in the form of Custom Box Service's on-time bonus (which is awarded if an employee is on-time every day in a pay period -- only pre-excused absences are allowed). It's not worth $162 to attempt to get well, so I'll stumble in to work, make Nick answer the phone, and generally be grumpy and miserable.

Why have I been sick so often this winter?

The ABPA baseball league that I'm in had its draft today. I went, despite ill health, and once again put together a mediocre team.

I've been in the league two years, and both times my team has finished with the worst record. This is an anomaly. My teams usually do well in fantasy and simulation leagues. I just can't figure out APBA Baseball, though.

During my first season in the league, I drafted what I considered a balanced team. It fared poorly. Last year I drafted a team with strong pitching. It fared miserably. This year I intended to draft a bunch of sluggers, but after the first few rounds I could focus only on how ill I felt. I ended up drafting a slew of mediocre relief pitchers and little else. My team is doomed to lose 100 games.

I'm tabulating an alternate medal count for the 2002 Winter Olympics. At book group last week, we were discussing how silly the standard medals table is. What's the point in listing how many medals each country has won if other information is not supplied: what's the population of the country? what's its gross domestic product? how many athletes did it send to the games?

There are other questions that might be asked, but these three are easily answered via the Internet. My spreadsheet demonstrates the relationship among these factors.

Some recent links of interest:

• OmniPad: an elegant, robust text editor designed for code-editing. I like it.
• Richard Packham's web site contains information about religion in general and Mormonism in particular.
• The Sysadmin's Universal Translator
• Tom Tomorrow: Here's one of my favorite recent episodes.

I am sick.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — Carpe Diem   I'm not trying to learn a foreign language for the sake of conversation. I want to learn Latin because it'll help me become a better reader.

2004 — A Walk in the Country   As part of my new fitness regimen, I've introduced light exercise. My favorite light exercise activity so far is a walk from Custom Box Service, through the nearby housing development.