I'm sick today, running a fever, sore throat and the whole thing. It came on pretty suddenly Sunday afternoon and since then I've had a lot of time to think, because that's what you do when you're alone in your house all day and have slept for four hours but can't muster the concentration to watch television or the will to take a shower. (It just sounds like a lot of work, you know?)

Here are some of the things my overheated brain has revealed to me today:

The best cup of hot tea in the land is made with Lipton decaf, sugar, and a drop of vanilla extract. You laugh, but it's true.

There is a blank spot on the right-facing side of our Christmas tree. I know because I spent a lot of time looking at it today, and as soon as I have the energy I'm going to go put an ornament there.

If you have a fever, shouldn't it just make you hot? That would help me a lot, because what I hate is that process where you're freezing and then you're sweating. It's really annoying.

Thank goodness for the December Photo Project over at View from the Prairie Box and friends. Gives me something pretty to look at.

I haven't taken a sick day at my job in over a year, and now I've taken two in the last week. What's up with that?

Profound, I know. This is why I want to get better. I'm boring myself to death over here. The end.

Today was a strange day. I went back to work since I finally stopped running a fever and was pronounced strep-free by my doctor. (I wish I had kept track of the number of times in my adult life that I've contracted strep. It's like my own personal plutonium.) But overall, it's been a week that has seen the utter derailment of all my plans. I had every intention of being at work this week, and that didn't happen until today. And today didn't quite turn out to be what I expected either. Wednesday seemed to start off from the first moment with bad communication and mechanical failure. The first obstacle course was a completely unprecedented, unprovoked and inexplicable overflowing of our hallway bathroom's toilet that sent me running for a plunger. It's great fun to plunge a toilet at 6:45 a.m., before you've had your coffee, let me tell you.

Then the minute that crisis was averted, the phone rang. The caller ID listed an unidentified number, and at first, I wondered what telemarketer would be calling my house at the unholy hour of 7 a.m. When I picked up the phone, there was even that tell tale five second delay of silence that usually makes you know you're dealing with a pre-recorded phone call. But I was rewarded for my patience when I heard my brother Ryan's voice! He was trying to call me from Africa, where he's stationed with the Marines, and it was so good to hear him. Unfortunately, we had an awful connection, and he couldn't hear me. Rather, it was like I would hear him, say something, then he would hear me, and say something, but there was such a delay between our voices that we canceled each other out. I gather that he was trying out a new computer-based phone system he's got, and something wasn't configured right. Eventually, he ended up saying that he wasn't sure I could hear him, but if I could, to know that he really wants to talk to me and will call me back soon. It's weird how happy it can make you just to hear someone you love get mad at a technological device. I would hear him muttering at the thing and pressing buttons, and once, he even said the trademark Ryan phrase -- "Sweet!" -- when we actually had a brief moment of connection. I'm sorry the conversation couldn't have lasted longer, but it was great to hear him and know that he still sounds like Ryan, even on another continent. It made me happy, in a sad, homesick kind of way.

The day continued to be weird, though. I was trying to catch up after two days out of the office, which is like an eternity in Newspaper Land. There was a mysterious lost email, a very important message that apparently just went into outer space after a professional contact of mine sent it to me. There were multiple phone calls about that, and in the end, the message had to be sent via fax, and we never did figure out what happened to the first one. I'm sure it will turn up next week some time.

It all got me to wondering if there are just days or weeks that are destined to bad communication and unexpected crises. Nothing catastrophic, just annoying failures of technology and human understanding that stand between you, the information you want so badly and your all-important schedule. Maybe it's not a bad thing to be reminded that you are, in fact, not completely in control of your own life and personal appliances. Annoying, but not completely without purpose. It made me think of that old phrase you hear elderly people use sometimes -- "If the Lord's willing and the creek don't rise."

So, Lord willing, tomorrow's another day.

Dan is out of town for a couple of days, and this means that I've been doing something I haven't done very much. I'm staying in the house by myself. Now, Dan going out of town is nothing new, and I stayed in our apartment alone plenty of times. But this is kind of different because we now live in a free-standing house, and somehow this makes me feel more like I'm really alone. Probably because if something weird happened, I couldn't just pound on the wall until someone heard me. Also, I figure that if I climbed out my bedroom window, I'd have to jump over our fence before I could reasonably expect to find someone to save me from whatever ran me out of the house.

This is the line of thought that probably led to my adventure last night. I fell asleep while I was reading a book, and since Dan wasn't home, there was no one to turn off the light. So around 2 a.m., I woke up kind of suddenly, and was lying there trying to go back to sleep, this time with the lights out, when I started hearing a thumping sound down the hall. Not a loud one, but persistent. In retrospect, putting on my bathrobe and looking for the nearest heavy object with which to arm myself was probably not the thing to do, especially since the heaviest thing in reach turned out to by my economy sized bottle of shampoo. I wasn't thinking clearly, which is why it's a good thing that after I crept down the hall in stealth mode, the noise turned out to be nothing but a door getting bumped against the door frame by the current created by the central heating. I then felt kind of silly, standing there without my glasses (read: legally blind), brandishing a bottle from my tub. Criminals beware! I have shampoo!

All that to say I'm glad my husband is coming home tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, when Dan and I were decorating our Christmas tree, I asked him what his favorite Christmas song is. This turned out to be a more educational question than I had anticipated, and it resulted in one of those moments when Dan and I realize again that even though we were both raised in two-parent, multi-kid, church-going American families, there is a rather large chasm between our childhood experiences. They were both great, even idyllic childhoods, but they were very, very different.

For example: Dan, in spite of living for a good portion of his developmental years overseas on various military bases, still manages to know the basic plot lines of shows like "The A Team" and "He-Man," and can have nostalgic conversations about them, and even hum the theme songs. My family, meanwhile back in the states, got rid of our television entirely some time in the early 1990s, and even before that, we weren't allowed to watch "The Smurfs," because my dad said they were communists. I am not making that up. Ask my siblings. They will tell you. This, by the way, is why I'm not sure I could ever write a novel: Nothing I could ever make up would be more amusing than true stories from my family. (Hi, Daddy! I love you, and I am sure that you were right about the Smurfs. Weird little blue commies.)

Still, you kind of assume that there are only about 45 Christmas songs out there, and so this has to be an area of common ground. So when I asked Dan what his favorite Christmas song is, I was confused when he named a song called "Mary Did You Know?"

"What?" I said. "I've never heard that song in my life. Are you sure you've got the name right?" I was working on the theory that Dan has a tendency to get the words to songs wrong. Just the other night, we were driving home after going to dinner with some friends, when the Bon Jovi song "You Give Love a Bad Name" came on the radio, and Dan confidently sang his version of the opening words to that song: "Shot in the dark! And you're too late!" I thought our friends, Mike and Kate, were going to throw up they were laughing so hard. But back to the Christmas music.

"Yes!" Dan said. "Someone sang "Mary Did You Know?" in church every Christmas of my life I'm pretty sure. Seriously, how can you not know this song?" He even told me some of the lyrics, clearly just knowing that any minute I was going to remember this integral part of Christmas. When no lights of recognition went off in my eyes, Dan looked at me a long time and blinked, like he does when he's realizing what a good job I'm doing of passing as normal most of the time, considering that I was homeschooled for a few years and never saw "Star Wars" until I was 16.

While Dan was turning to Google to find a downloadable rendition of his song, I said that my favorite Christmas song is "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." I've loved that song since I was a little kid, which is odd, because it's kind of a somber, Old Testament reference-heavy song, not exactly "Jingle Bells" or anything that just rolls off the five-year-old tongue. (Sample line: "O come thou Rod of Jesse, free thine own from Satan's tyranny." I don't think Hallmark is going to be putting that on a Christmas card any time soon, you know?) I was telling this to Dan when he started playing me his song from various Web sites. It turns out that a million people have put this song on their Christmas albums, from Reba McEntire to Clay Aiken, and it's a good song. But still, I've just never heard it before.

When Dan was done demonstrating to me that "Mary Did You Know" is, in fact, a bona fide Christmas staple as confirmed my millions of albums sold, I told him to search and see if there are any good renditions of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." And it turns out that once again, I am a weirdo. There are only about four recorded versions of this song that we were able to find, and they are all done in that nauseating souped-up, overdone style that plagues so much Christmas music.

I was feeling rather alienated by this until I made a purchase that reminded me that I am not alone in my weirdness. Yes, Sufjan Stevens' EP collection "Songs for Christmas" has "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" on it FOUR TIMES! This is now officially my favorite Christmas album ever. And we'll have to find a Christmas album with "Mary Did You Know?" on it too so that Dan will be happy. I'm just hoping it doesn't have to be the Clay Aiken.

What is it about a snow storm that makes you want to call your mom? I would welcome your theories on this, since Dan and I both, without prior discussion and with no real purpose in mind, called our moms at some point during the last 12 hours to say, essentially: "Hey, Mom! It's snowing a whole lot!" Like this affects our moms in any way as they go about their business in Mississippi and Texas. Did anyone else call their mom who lives several states away yesterday to comment on the weather? Or are we just extraordinarily odd?

In other notes, the snowstorm led us to realize that, as homeowners, it would behoove us to buy a snow shovel. As it was, we were thrown upon the charity of our lovely neighbors, who loaned us theirs so that we could clear off our driveway, thus allowing my Nissan Sentra, which is not an off-road kind of vehicle, to make it up into the carport. It was the only moment in my recent life when I wanted a big truck.