OK, so here’s what’s been going on.

I’ve given some vague allusions to my health issues over the last couple of weeks and I thought it was time to just let you guys know why, exactly, this blog has been stretched so very thin of late.

When I was in Las Vegas, I seem to have picked up some kind of bug that lay dormant in my system until the Tuesday after my arrival. In fact, I was fine as late as the evening of Monday, the 28th, when I had dinner with my friend Amanda at one of my favorite restaurants.

The next day (the 29th,) I woke up feeling…putrid. Deep, long coughs, lots of phlegm, low-grade fever. After two days of this, I gave in and went to see my doctor, who informed me I had viral pneumonia (which seems odd in retrospect, considering that one of the symptoms is that it’s a dry cough, but I trusted him,) and to stay home, in bed, and drink lots of fluids that weren’t whiskey. I did as asked and by Tuesday the 5th, felt ready to go back to work, and I did so, even if I was still coughing. The next few days go by fairly well, until I wake up on Friday – the symptoms were back in full effect.

So, I did the “lie in bed, drink lots of fluids, read Essential Power Man And Iron Fist” thing for a few days and was slowly feeling a bit more on the ball when…conjunctivitis decided to pay a visit. That’s right – after 33 years on this planet, I finally got my very own case of pink eye, complete with the sort of oozing discharge that I’d associate with having a dianoga around the house. After some consternation and an attempt to get a doctor’s appointment, I ended up in the ER in the wee small hour of the morning of the 12th, where I got goo for my eyes and x-rays for my chest.

The good: my lungs are doing better, as it appears to have been not quite viral pneumonia, but a bronchial infection that’s on the way out, and the eye goo did wonders. The bad? I woke up Friday morning with a vicious earache – I’d had some slight ringing in my right ear that I’d written off as sinus pressure, but apparently, get this – my sinuses got infected, too, and since they’re connected to my ear, drumroll please…ear infection!

So, I went back to the ER because my doctor is a worthless son of a bitch who can’t diagnose and the ER people are dead nice and they actually manage to do their job and now I’ve got a 2-week treatment course with antibiotics for my sinus/ear infection, a cough that’s barely there, eyes that are just fine, and a head that’s finally unfuzzy enough to start thinking about blogging here again seriously and, oh yeah, maybe working.

And that’s it. I don’t like to whine or talk about my personal stuff, but the past few weeks have been rough and I think that’s shown up. Combined with stuff going on with Birdie, that means The Rack has suffered too (only one strip this week so far), but I’m sure we’ll be back on track real soon now. I appreciate your patience with this matter.

Oh, yeah, I got some comics, too, so maybe I’ll talk about them soon.