not dead yet

This stuff still has me on the couch, but I'm slowly recovering. The fever dropped yesterday. Today, my brain's still pretty mushy and I feel like crap, but it's at least a somewhat better grade of crap.

I had to leave the house yesterday for, of all things, jury duty. You see, they originally wanted me to serve during the semester, which would've been quite nasty--imagine missing two weeks worth of classes, or four if it's a long trial. Finals won't wait, being a student isn't an excuse from jury duty, and unlike businesses I don't believe schools need to make accommodations. (What would they do, anyway? Write a special final for me and somehow try to wedge it back into the curve?) So I postponed jury service. But the voice menu system gave me only a six month range, which didn't help much--even pushing it back the full six months would've put it right in the middle of studying for the bar exam, definitely a career limiting move. So I did what I could to mitigate the damage and scheduled it to run over spring break.

However, you only get to do the "postpone for any reason" thing once. Then the flu came and knocked me flat on my keester. There's a two-week leeway built into the system, but that'd land me right back on top of classes, so it was no help. And the last time I tried the voice line it connected directly to the automatic system with no option to talk to a human, and I wasn't optimistic it'd be any better in the morning before a 7:45 a.m. reporting time. So yesterday I was pretty much trapped and, by operation of the rules of jury service, I had to risk infecting the jury pool. That's the danger of bright line rules, I guess.

I was pretty careful to minimize interacting with people--mostly just sat in my chair like a lump listening to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the iPod--and would've explained it to the judge if I'd gotten called, but fortunately God was looking out for all involved and I wasn't called for anything. It did set back my recovery a bit, though.