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Even though I've claimed that I want to spend my upcoming vacation at home (I know what word you're thinking of and I refuse to use it) doing nothing, in reality I have a whole bunch of things I'd like to do:

• Go to the zoo
• Visit Powell Gardens
• Have lunch at El Camino Real
• Watch the most recent season of "Glee" (it's all DVRed and ready)
• Have lunch at Andre's
• Take lots of yoga classes at my regular studio and my sister's studio
• Start my boot camp workouts
• See some movies (both at the theater and on DVD)

I'm sure I'll think of more things, but that's a solid start to what I have in mind.

The only problem is that I'd like my husband to be able to join me for most of these activities, yet he goes to bed when I get up and sleeps until mid to late afternoon. That'll make things a bit tricky. I'm hoping he's willing to adjust his schedule slightly so we can hang out together more.

If he can't make that happen, I guess I'll use the long mornings to read and drink coffee. Sounds like a good plan to me.

[Clarification: I know it sounds like this vacation is imminent, but actually it's not until the week after next. I'm just excited about it, that's all.]

I've now missed two days at the office because surely my co-workers do not want me around hacking germs into our shared airspace. Plus, when I start feeling poorly at home, I can just go lie down on the floor until my energy levels improve. I believe they may frown upon that at work.

Yesterday I made it into the doctor's office, only to be given the exact diagnosis and prescriptions I received about six weeks ago. So it's another bout of bronchitis and so far the medicines are accomplishing absolutely nothing as far as I can tell.

I'm actually getting work done, believe it or not. There's nothing like uninterrupted home office time when you need to burn through a bunch of minor projects. I'm still counting most of the past two days as sick time, but at least I've accomplished a few things and managed to phone into the few meetings I had.

Dr. Jones and Trillian spend the early mornings all riled up, but fortunately they sleep all day long. Here's Dr. Jones trying to catch the birds he hears outside. He thinks that if he climbs up high, he can reach them.

Trillian is wont to steal my chair when I get up, but she's mostly content to sleep in her little bed on my desk.

Isn't she beautifully shiny?

I'm hoping that tomorrow is a turning point and I can muster the energy to work all day at the office. I have a lot of meetings and some tasks that require my physical presence.

Man, I'm tired of being sick. Any tips for boosting my immune system so that I'm not such a delicate flower from now on?

I'm sick again. For the fourth time in 2010. This time I picked up a virus (probably from my bass player while we were doing a recording session last weekend) and it settled immediately into my chest, as per usual. On Friday afternoon I started feeling all the signs of impending doom, so I canceled my evening plans and stayed home to rest.

Then there was Saturday. I had some plans that I didn't want to cancel. They were strenuous plans, and I went through with them using every ounce of energy I could muster.

In the afternoon, my sister and I were booked into a two-and-a-half hour yoga workshop with Sadie Nardini. The room was packed full of people and it had to have been at least 90 degrees in there. I poured sweat the whole time and tried valiantly not to cough as we did challenging exercises designed to work your psoas muscles.

Let's just say I was not as in touch with my psoas as I would have liked. When I woke up this morning, my hip flexors and glutes were noticeably sore because I'm pretty sure they jumped in and shouted, "Me! Me!" every time I tried to access my deeper core muscles. Oh well.

As soon as the class was over, we got in my car and hit the road for a three-hour drive to Des Moines, Iowa, for a party celebrating the engagement of one of our third cousins (first cousin twice removed? I never know). I was doing all right on the drive, but once we got to the party I could tell I wasn't going to last long. We stayed about three hours, which was the length of time my on-hand cough drop supply lasted, then headed to our motel to crash.

After nine hours of sleep (aided by leftover codeine cough medicine from the last time I got sick), I felt a little better. We went back to our cousin's house for breakfast and learned that everyone had stayed up until four a.m. Fortified by coffee, breakfast and more cough drops, we headed back to Kansas City.

About an hour or so into the drive, I started incessantly coughing and throat clearing. We stopped off at a Wal-Mart and I picked up some OTC cough pills, which helped quell some of the symptoms while, of course, adding new ones. But I made it home in one piece and crashed until low blood sugar forced me to enlist my husband in joining me for a huge dinner at Cracker Barrel.

Even though I've only been sick for a couple of days, I think I'd better try to get a doctor's appointment tomorrow. I wish I could figure out why my immune system is so lousy these days. 

Right now my entire life is focused on making it to the week of vacation I have from June 21-25. I am staying home and my plan is to relax and do absolutely nothing. In the meantime, I need to get well so I can enjoy my time off.

So what's up with you this weekend?

Well, the four-day experiment of living life in the physical world is drawing to a close. Except for occasional glances at my e-mail, I stayed off the Internet from Thursday evening until now.

I won't lie to you, Friday morning was tough. I went to breakfast by myself, sans cell phone, and I felt positively twitchy. I hadn't realized how thoroughly my brain had become wired to constantly compose 140-character narrations of my every thought and activity.

Once I got home, I started looking around the house and discovering the ramifications of living life absorbed by a glowing screen.

First of all, every light fixture globe and candle holder in the entire house was fuzzy with dust. I took them all down and ran them through the dishwasher.

I thoroughly scrubbed the slate floor in the kitchen and hallway and let it dry overnight so I could seal it with semi-gloss acrylic. Man, was it overdue, but it looks amazing now.

Our shower was next on the agenda. It turns out that Tilex really works on mildewy grout…but you have to have an amazing capacity to hold your breath while you're spraying it. I liked the shower results so much, I bleached the bathroom floor with Tilex the following day. The grout hasn't been that white since the tile was newly laid.

I'd thought my dressing room wasn't too bad until I really started digging in. I had a ridiculous amount of junk mail stashed all over in bags and boxes. In fact, my gigantic recycling container is packed to the top with catalogs, envelopes and magazines.

Things I found in random locations while cleaning:

• My marriage certificate
• Almost a dozen cat toys of various sorts
• A good pair of sunglasses
• Photos from a camping trip I took in 2004
• Last year's end-of-season bill from our lawn guy, payment status unknown
• An envelope full of Brinks Home Security stickers (it was rebranded as Broadview Security in 2008)
• My Blockbuster video card from 1995
• Handfuls of hair ties and barrettes
• Two disposable cameras from 2005 and 2006

In going through all of the junk mail (and there was another cache of it from 2004/2005 in my office), I have learned that direct mail is completely wasted on me. I must have received 25 or more of the same credit card offer from Southwest Airlines in the past five years. I also had a zillion charity outreach mailings containing ugly address labels with coins glued inside the envelope. By the time I'd eviscerated all of the mail in the piles, I must have had close to a dollar from those mailings alone. I had never opened a single one of the envelopes until it came time to throw them away.

My office was the room that ultimately defeated me. I might have had a fighting chance to get it finished by the end of the weekend, but my husband and I took some time to have a couple of restaurant meals and even play miniature golf one afternoon. We also recorded a demo song with my band, hung out briefly with friends, and watched some DVDs that we need to return to the guy who lent them to us. We had a great time, but those activities ate up precious time that I could have spent cleaning.

The office is *this* close, though. Just a couple more hours and I'll have the last tub o' stuff unpacked and dealt with, and the piles of junk on my desk sorted and appropriately distributed.

One thing I can say for sure: I would never have gotten this much work done if I'd allowed myself access to the Internet this weekend. Every time I needed a little break, I just sat down and rested for a few minutes or played with the cats. If I'd gotten started scrolling through Facebook or reading my RSS feeds, I'd never have gotten back to work.

I think the key moving forward is going to be in limiting the times and duration of my web surfing. Instead of running upstairs to get online in the morning, I need to be putting on my sneakers and literally running out the door and down the street. When I get home, rather than checking my e-mail right away, I need to sort the snail mail and decide what goes in the recycle bin or shredder and what needs to be dealt with in some other way.

Can I do it? Well, let's hope so. At least now I know it can be done.

Earlier today, this song popped into my head. I even posted the video link to Twitter saying that I didn’t know why I’d thought of it just then. [Double-click video to watch it on YouTube at full size.]

However, I later remembered exactly what made me think of it.

I have an audition this evening with a possible second band. It occurred to me that I should send my husband the e-mail from the band with the guy’s name and address, just in case I ended up in a basement pit being ordered to rub the lotion on my skin.

Then I thought that I probably shouldn’t phrase it that way when I forwarded the e-mail, so I just said, “FYI.”

I'm going to start with the disclaimer that I'm not the most even-tempered person you'll ever meet. Let's just say that it's a good thing the other drivers can't hear me during my morning commute. However, my outlook on life in general is quite positive.

I didn't always feel this way. A guy I dated once told me that the thing that bothered him the most about me was my sarcasm. And I was very cynical and sarcastic then. At the time, I thought my sarcasm was a vital part of my personality, but I've grown to see it for the reflexive negativity it was.

A lot of the negative commentary I see online is very self-centered. For example, I've been noticing lots of posts on Twitter from people who don't watch "Lost," expressing how glad they'll be when they don't have to hear about it anymore. What, you can't just scroll past posts that aren't relevant to you? Why take a negative stance about something that you know nothing about except that other people enjoy it a great deal and like to discuss it?

The other day, a friend shared a post from Zen Habits called "Letting Go of Attachment, from A to Zen." It was a really thought-provoking article that I highly recommend, and one part that particularly struck me was:

"We attach to feelings as if they define us, and ironically, not just
positive ones. If you’ve wallowed in regret or disappointment for years,
it can seem safe and even comforting to suffer."

We all know people who can't seem to let go of grievances and negativity. I think of them as "mood vampires," who poison the feelings of those around them. I don't know about you, but once I've realized that someone I know is like that, I tend to keep my distance from then on.

I don't take things personally. I am not concerned with what other people think of me. I recognize that if I don't like something that's happening in my life, it's up to me to do something about it. I am fully aware that nothing lasts forever – good or bad. I generally assume that the worst case scenario is not going to come to pass.

When it comes right down to it, I choose to think positively, be happy, and try to make life better for others. It seems like a better approach than bogging myself down with bitterness, don't you think?