it's been ages since i was last sick, that i was beginning to feel forlorn about it. ah, the romance of disease! but now that i'm in day 4 of my illness, i'm not the least bit nostalgic. getting sick is no fun, period. the worst was friday, where i couldn't stop blowing my nose. it also didn't help that i relied too much on my own natural immune system to fight the virus, when i should've been medicating immediately. there's no shame in resorting to modern pharmacology for salvation. especially with my pampered immune system: since i rarely go out and work mostly from home, i'm not exposed to enough pathogens to build up a robust immunity. i'm like the boy in the bubble. it's a miracle i don't get sick more often.

by saturday my nose was still runny, but my mucus (gross!) was already becoming cloudier and thicker, signs that the disease was running its course. saturday i was beginning to cough a bit, sunday a little more. that's probably the post-nasal drip working its voodoo. this morning, monday, i did feel better, but still a little tired. the congestion comes and goes, boosted by some leftover sudafed tablets. i'm still not quite sure what i have. is it a cold? is it the flu? as of today, i think it's just a bad cold. bad cold exacerbated by 2 days' worth of shoveling instead of resting, which would explain the aches and pain. every once in a while i might sneeze, which hurts my throat for some reason (fortunately it doesn't happen very often).

my upstairs neighbors are supposed to be back today. instead of telling me directly, steve forwarded me the e-mail he sent to our roofers, who wrote him last week saying they'd be able to come by tomorrow (tuesday) to fix the roof. that was before the blizzard. i can't imagine they could safety work under these conditions. for one thing, there's no place to easily put their ladders, not with all the snow piled up. later he sent a general e-mail to the members of the informal "elm tree removal committee", letting everyone know that he and paul might not get back until tomorrow because they're having problems with their return flight. i hope that's the case, gives me another night of quiet sleep where i don't have to listen to their stomping.

with nothing due for my clients, the goal of today was just to rest. i should be an expert at lounging around by this point, but for some reason it was kind of hard. i spent some time backing up my files from the old MBP onto an external hard drive, so they can be transferred over to the new MBP. i had a brief scare when the drive mounted but my photos folder was greyed out. i restarted and everything went back to normal, but the copy failed midway and then the hard drive unmounted by itself. i forgot all my external hard drives as NTFS for better cross-platform compatibility, but it can be a nightmare when the drive crashes. i did discover that the latest version of tuxera NTFS (which is what i use on my mac) allows chkdsk right from the disk utility tool, something that couldn't be done in the past, and the only to fix it was to restart on a PC and run chkdsk that way. chkdsk found some corrupt directories; after they were fixed, the hard drive behaved like normal.

do people still wear watches? i know i do. i have 2, an analog and a digital. when my analog watch broke, i was on the search for a replacement. the timex digital watch is okay but it has a velcro strap which tatters the sleeves of any shirts i wear (it's a better watch for the summer, when i wear more t-shirts). what i wanted was a watch with a simple white face with black numbers, a second hand, and a light. i've had my eyes on the timex weekender for a while, even before my old analog broke. when the price dropped by a few dollars on amazon.com ($28.96), i ended up buying one. it was supposed to arrive on friday, but due to the storm, no deliveries could be made during the entire weekend. the watch finally arrived today. it's a nice watch, but the thing i noticed right away was how large the face was. if i had to do it again, instead of the unisex i'd get a women's size (although the color combinations on the women weekenders are all pretty feminine). the watch also had some weight to it because of the metal body. i ended up wearing the watch the rest of the day to test it out. it's pretty comfortable, eventually i didn't even notice it anymore.

i finally transferred over my e-mails onto the new MBP. i didn't want to use apple's migration assistant because i remembered it was all or nothing. maybe it's changed since i last used it, but i wasn't afraid to just do it manually. i was surprised that 6+ years of e-mail was only 2.9GB - i was expecting it to be larger. following the steps i found on this mac forum, i copied over the files onto the new machine. it took 2 attempts but i finally got it to transfer everything completely. the new mail app in OS X 10.8 is a little different, but not so much that i can't quickly get used to it.

i had some leftover chinese dumplings for dinner while watching another celtics game. boston ended up losing to the charlotte bobcats in a close game. later in the evening i heard steve and paul finally returning home.