Sick Day

I took a sick day today. Not quite as good as taking one on a day of class, but it had to be done. I woke up about 9 this morning, and dragged myself downstairs to eat some breakfast so I could take my cold medicine. At 10, I was about to fall asleep again (who knows why), so I managed to make it back to my room and slept until about 1. After that, I watched TV for a while, then cooked myself a nice meal. I haven't been eating a lot while I've been sick, mostly just what I could grab quickly, so last night, I decided I was going to cook tonight. So I did. I could barely taste anything, but at least I ate. After eating, I worked a little while on my Tactical Missiles homework that Flandro gave us to work on. It's an evil vector algebra problem, which happens to reduce to a fairly simple vector algebra problem. (It's an order-of-magnitude argument to do the reduction.) My answer matches an equation I found online to do the same type problem, so I'm pretty satisfied it is correct.

One thing I've learned from this cold: there are some flavors which should never be mixed. I have cherry-flavored cough drops, orange-flavored DayQuil, and green-flavored NyQuil (officially it's "original" flavor, but I don't know what that means, so I call it green-flavored). Add to that any food I eat, plus tea, and it's no wonder I can't taste anything. Besides the cold knocking out some of the ability, my taste buds have retreated in order to survive the onslaught.

On TV today, the History Channel was airing a marathon of Dogfights. I watched about 3 hours worth during the middle of the afternoon. The show was a balance between the pilots' reactions and the airplanes' performances. Among the planes I saw were two types of MIGs, F8's, Wildcats, Hellcats, Zeros, a Flying Fortress, and several others. The Flying Fortress took on at least 17 Zeros during its mission, and returned to base. The front gunner died, and the pilot was badly injured, but the mission was completed and the aircraft landed back at base. Another interesting part was how the Hellcat was an improvement over the Wildcat (and was better than the Zero) and how that led to American domination in the Pacific theater. Also, and it can't be said enough, American servicemen and women should be thanked and honored all day everyday for what they've done for us. Some gave all; all gave some.

It would be exceptionally nice to be able to breathe when I wake up. More tomorrow.