But I don't get sick
I’m looking for someone to blame
Readers, I don’t get sick very often. I try to maintain a decent diet, I bike to work nine months out of the year, and… okay, I also smoke 4-6 cigarettes a day, but only the additive-free kind! (Yes, in Cambridge we even go green with our bad habits.) 
The last time I recall being sick was at the end of December last year, when I decided to bike to work in -2 degrees. (That’s with wind chill. It was a nice positive single digit number without.) I had bundled myself up very well, but it was so cold I felt the wind through my helmet. Yes, I got a head cold because my head actually got too cold.
Yet today it is sixty degrees out and I have a raging cold/flu/death virus of some kind, and I don’t know why. It could have to do with the fact that it poured four days out of five last week and I biked each of those days. But it’s been rainy all summer. We did walk about seven miles on Saturday, the day before I woke up discovering I was unwell. But we walk a lot, albeit perhaps not as much as we want to.
So I don’t know what’s going on here. I do know that tomorrow’s bike commute is going to be a real bitch.
In other news
The walk yesterday was to suss out the distance and ease by which wife Deb could walk to/from her new place of employment. It’s 2.8 miles on foot, which can be accomplished at a brisk pace in about 55 minutes. And the walk takes us from our home to the rough halfway point of Harvard Square, and out the other side of the Square to Memorial Drive. It’s a nice walk.
We had the distinct pleasure of watching The Social Network in the theater in Harvard Square last week, which was a uniquely strange experience, as we were sitting roughly 1/4 mile from where every scene from the first half of the film took place. It was actually distracting because all of it was filmed on location and so I spent a LOT of time trying to remember where I’d seen this or that stairway, storefront and so on before.
In one scene in the movie the Mark Zuckerberg character is brought into the “bike room” of a “final club” (Harvard’s version of a frat). The scene begins outside, and I was nearly positive I knew the exact door they used on Mass Ave.
Our walking path took us past that door on Saturday. And I was literally moments away from turning to Deb and saying, “hey does this door look familiar?” when that door opened up and out came a half dozen college students in sports jackets and neckties and crisp white shirts.
Surreal is seeing real life in a film. Doubly surreal when that film spills out into real life right in front of you.
Immortal news
This morning Immortal is showing up on Amazon with the following legend: “Only two left in stock– order soon (more on the way)”. Given how infrequently Amazon actually updates their listings (the updates become more frequent the higher the book rises in sales figures) there is no way of knowing how accurate this statement is.
However, two things can be considered true:
1: they have finally checked in the first shipment of books and are shipping out copies to the first round of buyers;
2: more books ARE on the way, as another shipment is going today.
It may be a month or more before Amazon and my publisher reach a happy medium where there are enough in stock regularly to satisfy demand. In the meantime, I don’t much mind declaring the book “sold out”, because it IS.
Let’s keep this ball rolling, then. Get your copy here.
