Oof. Yucky flu today--nothing too terrible, just achiness all over and dizziness whenever I stand up. Luckily, Nika's been angelic--she's just slept on the couch beside me all day, and never prodded me for big walks or exercise. As long as I'm sitting/lying down, I'm all right, so I still managed to do my TA work, cut some more out of my conference paper (I'm down to 15 A4 pages--five more to go!), and read about 80 pages of a book for my thesis. (The Magnificence of Eszterháza, by Mátyás Horányi.) Luckily, it's also a research source for my new novel, which gives me added interest and incentive! There are lots of lovely, weird and fascinating details of life at Eszterháza in "my" time period. Makes me wish I could have been a visitor there for puppet operas, fireworks, masked balls, fake battles, "fairylands", and all the rest...although, more realistically, I probably would have been one of the downtrodden, starving peasants, fiercely resenting the millions spent on conspicuous consumption by the Hungarian aristocrats!

(As one contemporary French traveller wrote: "When one glimpses, among the clusters of straw huts which hardly protect their dwellers from wind and weather, soaring marble palaces rising to Heaven out of this incredible wilderness, on which swarms of skeleton-like men look for roots to still their hunger; when in their midst, one sees gardens with fountains, grottos, parterres, terraces, statues and costly paintings; then one has the proof that one part of the population lives from robbing the other.")

Patrick's on his way home now. Yay! I'll probably crash by nine or ten tonight, but the rest of the evening should be really good. Only one more day till Christmas vacation begins...