California, Day Four - Disaster

The last 24 hours or so have been a disaster.

Things didn’t start out so bad yesterday. My sister was feeling tired, so I struck out on my own and headed to Japantown in S.F. and to Mill Valley in Marin County. For lunch, I had my first In-and-Out Burger, and in the afternoon I headed up to Novato in North Marin County for a business meeting. So far, so good.

After the meeting, I stopped at my sister’s in the late afternoon. After chatting for a while, I stepped outside to play catch with her dog and immediately caught a chill. “Is it me or is it getting really cold out?,” I asked her husband, who answered that sure, it was cooling off.

But when I got back inside, I was still cold and soon started shivering. My sister found a thermometer, and sure enough, I was running a 100.6 fever. She piled me up under a bunch of blankets in the living room and we ate Chinese food, and after a while I seemed to recover somewhat, and returned to the Tiburon Lodge.

Now a word or two about the Tiburon Lodge: as I’ve said, there is no Internet access in the rooms, and I’ve been forced to blog from the Business Center. But today, they started a renovation project, and have surrounded the whole place with six-foot-high chain-link fence and have locked up the office, including the Business Center. Both have been moved to a former conference room, where I’m now typing this on a card table under the watchful eye of the night manager, sitting across from me at a second card table.

If you’re visiting the Tiburon/Marin County area, do yourself a favor and don’t stay at the Tiburon Lodge.

Anyway, I got back to the Lodge and got under the covers of my bed and rode out the fever for a couple hours, with all the usual flu symptoms: chills, aches, sore joints, etc.

When I got up this morning, I felt better and drove over to Emeryville on the Oakland side of the bay for a second business meeting, but no one I was supposed to meet with was there. S. was in another meeting and had to leave at 11:00 (it was 10), C. hadn’t come in yet, and J.’s office light was on, but no one knew where she was. So I headed over to Berkeley.

Berkeley, if you haven’t been there, is now one big neighborhood of Indian and Thai restaurants, sort of like a larger version of New York’s St. Mark’s Place but with more formica and fluorescent lights.

I had vegetarian Thai for dinner, but could start to feel my energy drain again, so I headed back to the homely comforts of the Tiburon Lodge and spent the afternoon in my room with the heater cranked all the way, alternately shivering and sweating under all of the blankets on the bed.

But being the kind of person that I am, I found a second wind and headed over to the San Francisco Zen Center’s City Center for their evening service. The meditation actually seemed to help the flu situation, and since I’ve gotten back, I’ve felt a little better. Plus the whole Zen/Mahayana experience was refreshing after last Monday’s Theravedan encounter.

So, the last thing that I wanted to happen the whole time I was taking care of L. while she was sick – namely, getting sick myself during my trip to San Fran – seems to have happened, but at least I’ve gotten caught back up to the present in my blog.