Looking Back at Yesterweek

Wow, what a week. On Wednesday, I tried to take a morning off to rest, and came down with a distinct 38 degree fever instead.

(This after already having taken 2 days MC a week before when I felt the first beginnings of flu in order to stave it off with lots of rest... I ended up going back to work feeling okay, somewhat woozy-ish, with a running nose like a dripping tap that WOULDN'T go away until last Wed-Fri great fever burnout.)

I waffled through half an afternoon of work through an essentially half-lucid fever dream, hanging on for a brief talk at (not to, at) some teachers, and told my boss that I was essentially at H1N1 or SARS temperatures and that I really needed to go see a doc.

And I went. You'd think a clinic would be quite empty after leaving work at 4.30pm, but it was packed to the brim, so I ended up waiting until 5.45pm to finish up. One of the receptionists was rather grumpy about it seeing as the clinic was supposed to close at 5pm. Of course, she was the one taking my temperature with the point and shoot fever gun thingy. She did it from about one foot away, goodness knows what her aim was like, because she wrote down 36.4.

I went 'huh' to myself, and thought, uh oh, so much for early detection of potential H1N1 or SARS people. I went to the toilet since it was miles away from being my turn and took my own temperature with my digital thermometer and sure enough, it was 37.7.

Why was I being so neurotic about the whole thing? Well, my cousin had just collapsed in NS a couple days ago, freaking the whole family out, and he ended up in ICU with a 40 degree fever and literally on deaths's doorstep at one point where he was unconscious, feverish, shaking involuntarily, and with a racing heartrate of 150. He managed to pull through, thankfully, but tests came back to confirm it was indeed H1N1. Purty scary.

Seeing as I am probably far more overweight and unhealthier than he is, the only thing going for me is my age (which may have exposed me to a few more flu varieties) and my lack of baking in the sun and disgustingly seasonally hot/humid air doing anything strenuous, and hopefully, lack of exposure to the H1N1 virus in the first place. (Except a colleague's wife has H1N1 and he was all masked up as a precaution a couple days ago.)

So anyhow, the doc confirmed that it was indeed a pretty nasty case of flu. He should know, he had my records for the last week, where I was only at a 37.2 degree rise in temperature and having a bad case of sniffles. He also said that this seemed to be the pattern of flu folks had been having for the last couple weeks.

In between my misery and nausea, I did manage a slight smirk when the doc took my temperature, and went "yikes, 37.8" while looking down at the card that reported a "36.4". That outside thermometer not so accurate, he mumbled. I said, dunno how your nurse measure. :P

He decided to give me two days MC for Thurs and Fri so I could rest for a four day stretch. I wasn't going to argue.

He also switched to a stronger Ibuprofen rather than paracetamol. Yucky thing was, I almost ate up the whole pack, 8 hours at a time, before the fever was finally over.

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So that essentially was Thursday and Friday. Most of it spent asleep, in an attempt to get rid of the fever. In between, spurts of 15 minute ATITD to log on to fertilize flowers (which can only be done every 2 hours), and grow onions for sheep (annoying, good thing I only maintain 4 pens now), and grow cabbage for beetles (somewhat annoying, but the harvest is 20 a time), and play with beetle patterns.

Ah, beetle patterns. I love beetle patterns. And beetle breeding. It's nuts, but it is amusing. Every 4-8 hours, I flip through the tanks staring at the 4-25 beetles that have popped up. I prune the oogly ones. I keep the patterns that look nicest and most alike, and then I leave them in there to interbreed. And they make little beetle offspring that look like a mix of both mama beetle and papa beetle, with a teensy sprinkle of unpredictable mutation.

And being surprised at what the unpredictable mutation generates is the fun bit.

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On Saturday, the fever started to lift. Finally. I was still feeling kinda woozy and unable to stare at the ATITD screen for too long, so I didn't push it.

Started to read some WH40K books instead. Re-read Gaunt's Ghosts: The Founding series.

Later in the evening, I was oozing nostalgia. It was Welcome Back weekend in ATITD, so I logged Indra back on to see pretty much a deserted neighborhood. No one recognizable around. Oh well. Took a few screenshots for posterity and headed back off again.

It was also double xp in both CoH and Aion. I gave CoH up as a bad idea since the ATI graphics card issue was still giving me some lag the last time I tried, and I'm still waiting for Going Rogue and the new powersets anyhow. I poked my head back in Aion instead. Been chucked out of the guild there too. Did a quest or two, killed twenty or so mobs, got boring and logged off.

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What had been growing as a terrible uncontrollable urge to let the galaxy burn started surfacing sometime Sat/Sun. Too much WH40K fiction. Needed to see Imperial Guard and Space Marines and Chaos duke it out.

So my will to resist until there was a 50% sale collapsed, and I bought the Chaos Rising expansion for Dawn of War II.

I also discovered that there was another online store called Good Old Games, and there, they sell old classics like Arcanum. As well as many others like Stonekeep, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, etc. Hmm... very tempting, but lack of disk space helped to resist that temptation until later.

The Chaos Rising expansion downloaded in a split second, so I bet there was already a pre-download to my Dawn of War II game months earlier.

I started, only to realize that my offline Windows Live account had completed the first game, and that my online Windows Live account had no completed campaign to import.

Trying to start a new commander fresh felt pregenerated, and I gave up after the first mission. After all, the POINT of the expansion is the whole corruption mechanic: to choose to (or not to) corrupt your marines so that they either turn into nasty minions of Chaos or stand proud and unsullied as purehearted servants of the Emperor.

I tried to play with the offline Windows Live account, and started twitching at the thought that I was missing some neat achievements. (Ah, the terrible addictiveness of a shiny meaningless badge!) What sealed the deal was an accidental discovery of the corruption mechanic because I'd tried to 'sell off to upgrade' a piece of valuable wargear.

Or rather, it was a weapon I was using - except there was a label on it that said 'sell to upgrade.' I thought that oh, this is my old campaign, so maybe the new expansion has a new version, and this is their method of converting old version 1 gear. (What, this happens in MMOs all the time!) So I sold it. And up popped in my inventory a new version of the weapon, a little stronger, and I went "oooh, nice" until I found out I could no longer USE the weapon, because of a little dinky footnote on it that said "Corruption + 3" required... Eeep! Now my Space Marine has no weapon because he's not corrupted yet!

Subsequent sell offs simply upgraded the weapon further to this big purple badass weapon that needed god-knows-what level and +20 corruption level to equip. It was un-get-riddable. Having little D&D flashbacks of cursed items, I stared glumly at the wart in my inventory disturbing my OCD impulse, and decided to delete that campaign as a bad idea too.

What the heck - there was a bunch of un-won achievements on my Windows Live account, I'd forgotten the backstory of the first game that the second campaign kept referencing...

... so I started the original campaign from scratch again.

Ironic. I needn't have bought the expansion for a couple days yet.

Still fun though. I seem much better at it the second go around. On the second-highest difficulty, and still having less trouble with the big bosses than the first time around.