I woke up this morning to the uncomfortable realization that my throat was sore. There was a short period of denial, which quickly ended the second I downed an entire glass of water and discovered that it wasn't that I was just extraordinarily thirsty.

As the day wore on, it got worse. My head stuffed up, my nose decided to run constantly, and my throat felt swollen from being so sore. At one point I rifled through my purse and found one remaining dosage of Tylenol Cold medicine, which I promptly swallowed in the hopes that it might push this thin away. While it did manage to calm the nose and the throat a bit, I think it was a night-version, because I spent the next several hours feeling as if my head and my mouth were no longer connected. Spacey doesn't even begin to describe it. Heh. Luckily it wore off and I found my brain again, but with clarity of thought came the return of the Winter Thing in full force.

Somehow, this time, it doesn't seem as bad. Even though I'm facing the fact that I'm most likely going to start this new job on Monday while sick, this doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. The sheer fact that it is a new job; that I do not have to board a plane to fly to Riverside like every one of my Benthic Creatures (ex) coworkers; makes being sick yet again seem a little less an issue in the grand scheme of things.

If I could, I would take most of my coworkers with me. Most of them are people I'd be happy to work with on a more permanent basis. Some of them are people I could have easily become good friends with, were the politics of work and the difficulties of distance not in the way.

I turned in my laptop on Wednesday. Some time next week I'll clean out my car of all the remaining paraphernalia, and some time next week (sooner rather than later) I'll file my very last expense report.

If I look past the anger and frustration over retractions and misunderstandings and great, gaping communication holes, I can be glad of the experience. Driving home this evening for the very last time, I know that I am gladder still that the experience has finally ended.