Well, I’m mostly recovered from the weekend cold. I still feel like everything is hidden behind about two inches of expanded foam insulation. On the plus side, I’m not sweating buckets, my cough has tapered off to nearly nothing, and I’ve decided that a DayQuil and tonic is better than a gin and Alka-Seltzer.
Ok, I’m joking about that last one. I’m not quite to the point of making mixed drinks out of things that will simultaneously cause and cure hangovers.
Saturday was an effort filled day. We headed over to Rob’s place to troubleshoot a wireless network problem he was having. The Cold that Ate My Brain was just starting to ramp up at that point, so I was able to get things solved fairly quickly. Basically, it was a simple matter of turning on a switch that gave the hub “Interference Robustness,” but there was a lot of drama beforehand involving guesswork about the password for the hub itself. The drama went away quickly when we realized that you can type in the correct password dozens of times and still not get in if you’re out of range of the network itself.
After that we decided to go out for Thai food in an attempt to blast the congestion out of my sinuses with spicy food. This didn’t work as planned. The Thai place near Rob’s has got the worst schedule I’ve ever encountered. Four of the five or so times I’ve gone there, they’ve been closed, with a sign posted indicating that they won’t be open again for a couple of weeks. I have no idea how they can operate like that. Anyway, we went a little bit further down the way to the Chinese buffet where I experimented with spicy mustard, wasabi, and Kim Chee as methods of clearing sinus blockage. Kim Chee worked best.
We briefly debated going to a movie, but I was so out of it that we just meandered homeward with quick stops at a pet store and a book store on the way.
Sunday was the cold’s day. I was prone for most of the time, until I discovered that sitting up let my ears drain. I’m sure y’all don’t want all the gory details of snorting, sniffling, hacking, coughing, honking, sneezing, snotting, drizzling and dripping. The odd thing was that at about 9pm I had a cup of hot coffee, and soon I was feeling much better. I’m not sure if it was the heat or the caffeine, but it did the trick. I sat up and watched a DVD that we’d bought on a whim.
It was “A Knight’s Tale” and it was great.
Now, if you’re going to watch this movie and enjoy it, you’re going to need to suspend your disbelief from a very high place and leave it there twisting in the wind. The whole rock & roll professional-wrestling-meets-ren-fest atmosphere isn’t going to be for everybody, but it works surprisingly well. The best character in the movie is Chaucer, who spends a surprising amount of time naked. He has the best lines, and when he launches into one of his speeches the rest of the movie slows down to listen. That sort of halt could be awkward, but not in this film. If it were a racing film, it’d be the revving of engines before the green light. In this movie, it’s a moment of expectant calm before the storm of another high-energy jousting sequence.
And if there’s one thing this movie does well, it’s a joust. Two people on horseback galloping at each other at high speed with big pointy sticks is an impressive sight. The splinters and crashes when they hit are absolutely spectacular. You may not even notice that the film is over 2 hours long, unless you’ve been doped up on cold meds and need to pee every ten minutes.
But that’s getting back to details that you didn’t want to know.