Back up.

Wow.

It's humbling for me to see how demoralized I got last week in the face of illness. The fever/cold didn't get to me; my spirits were still high. But as soon as I started feeling nausea, that was the end of my morale. Thanks to the two sweet ladies that left get-well-soon messages on my blog. They made my morning.

I'm back up to speed now, running at about 95% of normal. I don't yet feel completely there but I've got most of my energy and appetite back. I'm in the office on a saturday morning because an interview candidate is presenting a case study that we asked him to do a few weeks back. He was meant to present earlier but, you guessed it, he was down pretty bad with a flu.

The maid that comes in the morning to sweep/clean for me is Tamil. She only speaks Tamil. The lady who lives next door, Uma (who is awesome), set me up with this maid so she bargained and everything in Tamil. Now I'm left to communicate with her by sign language. I was relying on being able to call up Sindya and have her translate but, unfortunately, she's out of town this week on a water-sports trip (she's taking the kids to a place 5-6 hours away called Hannemardu). The lady is really sweet; her daughter-in-law works at Uma's place. She's pretty old and very smiley. I made tea for her yesterday morning. She told me that she won't come to work tomorrow because it's Sunday but Uma had told me that I should give her 1-2 days off every month but that she'd work on Sundays in general. I tried telling her that this morning but, of course, there was some severe communication gap. Oh well. Once Sindya gets back things will get sorted out hopefully. In the mean time I'm beginning to be able to recognize the few words of Tamil that I know. It's wierd but, even though I knew some words before, it was hard to pick them out in sentences. Now I'm getting better at that.

What else? The world definitely looks like a brighter, sunnier, more beautiful place this week than last. Hopefully I'll be able to go climbing again by next week. This weekend I need to focus on sorting through all my boxes that were delivered last weekend, so my place starts looking more like a home and less like a warehouse.