# 9 Dream (plus VAT)

I'm very lucky though I'd concede that right now I don't feel that way. I had the makings of a doozie of a cold, perhaps even a touch of the flu going 'round the Northeast, earlier in the week and it was more than imperative that I NOT be sick for events that were to happen yesterday, and did.

My newest doctor squeezed me in for an appointment late Thursday afternoon though she, too, was working on her own version of the illness and sounded like she was losing (she was perfecting her impersonation of Susan Saint. James in MacMillan and Wife). I think she caught it in 'the nickel of time' as my younger sister Jill, used to say.

One of the side effects of the medicines she prescribed has been a desire to sleep. For the last two days I've been able to drop off in the middle of a sentence, yours or mine, usually to be awakened with a hacking cough which is all I really have left from my close encounter of the germicidal kind. For someone who usually gets about five and half hours of sleep a night, this desire for two and three times that number of minutes is a little spooky and is causing me to wonder if the cure isn't worse than the illness.

Of course when you ask me tomorrow morning as I head downstairs to feed the chickens and work out on the cross-trainer, hours before the sun breaks the horizon I'll have a very different answer. I hope.
-bill kenny