Still in NYC
I should have left for norway last week, but due to the flu I couldn't fly. Now I am declared well enough to fly - once I contacted the insurance company and convinced them I could NOT fly last week, I needed a doctor's report to be allowed to get back on a plane again - and I am just waiting for the travel-insurance company to book me a ticket home.

I have been working like a maniac all winter, and I was afraid that exactly this might happen. I ignore my own exhaustion and go on until I have no resistance left. This is why I had cleaned my schedule for these two weeks, they were supposed to be a vacation. but since I didn't manage to finish the thesis before I left, it became two more weeks of intense and stressfl work. Friday, when I was supposed to rest, my body screamed stop, and I got a fever higher than I have had for several years.

So, instead of getting on a plane Sunday, I read and slept. there was a blizzard in New York, but I didn't notice anything, I was competing with the radiator for heat. The last week-end, when I was supposed to say goodbye to friends and do some last-minute shopping came and went, and I was coughing my lungs out in Brooklyn. My son's birthday, which had been carefully considered as I planned the vacation, zoomed past, and his present is right here in my suitcase. matthew, my NYC connection, friend and surrogate family has been doing his best to spoil me, but not even he could change the view outside his window from one of backyards and houses into the cool, clean view of the fjord which I have been aching for.

I guess I am cured for a while now, not of the flu - I am still coughing and my voice isn't good - but of the bug that makes me want to get out, away, onwards to foreign countries and different ways of life. All I want now is to get home, settle into the manageable orderliness of my life, and rest... for a very long time.