One of the most frustrating things about recovering from a bout of winter cold/flu/whatever this is, is that I get exhausted really easily. I get out of bed, go downstairs and get myself breakfast and I end up with my elbows on the table, gasping for breath into my Pop Tarts (the breakfast of the truly mature adult). I wander back upstairs and end up collapsing in my computer chair, listlessly smacking at the delete button for all the Valentine's Day related spam in my inbox (there's a certain flower company out there who seems really determined to make sure that I'm aware that I can get free chocolates with my order of a dozen roses. At what point does this become harassment, I wonder?).

I stayed home from work today because I figured getting easily exhausted probably didn't have a place on the freeway during the half-awake not-yet-caffeinated drivers on a Monday morning. Besides which, I'm also nursing a lovely cough. What with the lack of energy and the hacking I feel like a poster child for why it's a bad idea to get into a five-pack-a-day smoking habit.

But the winter cold/flu/whatever could not deter me completely. If I was going to be sick all weekend, by golly, I figured I might as well get something productive done. So yesterday afternoon Richard and I put the primer on all the boards for the shelves (in between synchronized bouts of coughing, sneezing, and wheezing. It was very romantic. Trust me). And today I slapped two coats of paint on those suckers. I lay them out propped up on our recycling bins and some drawers from a chest of drawers we were planning on donating to charity (We can still donate it, I suppose, but it's a bit paint splattered now). Using rollers makes painting long flat surfaces go really fast, so I'd go out to the garage, slap on some paint, then crawl back inside and collapse in a chair panting, to ponder the wisdom of inhaling paint chemicals while sick for an hour or two before going back out to do it again.

But they're painted, finally. Which means that next weekend my dad comes over with his saw and we hack the backboard down to size and then finally get those darn shelves put together and installed. And I suppose I ought to at least point out that we are not talking about some puny little set of shelves. Nope. This sucker stands about eight feet tall and four feet wide. The back is a piece of plywood that took great contortions on my part to paint (considering that even when standing on my toes and stretching, and leaning the board down as far as I could, I still don't reach eight feet into the air). These shelves will be attached directly to the wall in the bedroom, and the actual shelves are very shallow - only six inches. Just the right size for our ever-growing collection of (science fiction / fantasy / horror) paperbacks.

Once the shelves were done, and because sucking down a whole lot of paint fumes wasn't enough to scare the cold/flu/whatever viruses into submission, I decided to tackle the litter box closet, a task which involved dragging both electric litter boxes (yes, I said electric) out, scrubbing them down, sweeping up all the litter on the floor (my cats feel that litter works best when artistically flung in every direction), and then scrubbing the floor too. And after I did that then I had to clean up the bathroom because there was�.goo�everywhere. I won't go into details. If you've had cats for any length of time you understand.

After all of that big stinky excitement (which seemed to be the theme today - stinky paint, stinky litter boxes) we went and got salmon tandoori for dinner because spicy food clears the sinuses (and hoo boy did they give it a kick tonight!) and came home to watch the Olympics, where I got to see what skateboarding punks do when it snows, and also some pretty amazing leaping and twirling and tossing and all the other nifty things that go along with pairs skating.

I would say it's bedtime except that someone (unfortunately, that would be me) had the brilliant idea that she should take advantage of the nice weather and wash the sheets to line dry them and so the bed has yet to be made, and the cats refuse to express gratitude for the sparkling cleanliness of their toilet facilities by making the bed up for me. Ungrateful little furballs. See if I let them sleep on my pillow toni�.oh, what am I saying. Like I even have a choice.