Second, please leave a comment with which haiku you like best and/or write one of your own. I will read them all through the thick, watery film that is covering my eyes. And then I will laugh-cough until I crumple into a muscle-weakened pile on the floor. Wherein I will hopefully recuperate. And possibly be a little less dramatic about it all.

I Have a Bad Cold – 1

viral consciousness
threatens to disintegrate
into fevered dreams

I Have a Bad Cold – 2

thick, watery eyes
head a runny, stuffy mess
bite my ass, virus

I Have a Bad Cold – 3

runny, stuffy mess
bite my shiny metal ass
you stupid virus

I Have a Bad Cold – 4

littering room with
virus-laden used tissues
for the sexy win

Virally=

After long discussions over time with Ben about which TV stand to buy for our rear-projection big screen that we purchased several months ago (and love watching, sometimes to the point of tears it’s so wonderful… I’m talking about you, NBC’s Heroes), we finally agreed to purchase the stand that was made for our TV. It’s the end of the TV stand season, apparently, because I read somewhere online that many stores have them on clearance.

So I walked in and up to a sales guy in electronics and told him what I wanted. But I had seen it online for $100 cheaper because they’re going out of style for next year’s model, so could he do anything about the price? He said he would check and walked over to his manager, presumably. Then he came back and said that they could take $50 off…. and I said I’d take it. Because with shipping, the onilne stand would have been just as much anyway.

But. And there’s always a but like this when something is going well, right? The only TV stand in that model that RC Willey has anywhere, including all of their warehouses, was the one on display. The one with a big scratch on the front. Forget it, and also, dammit. Ben and I finally agreed upon a piece of furniture (a huuuuuuge deal…. we’re also still trying to find a decent couch to replace the one that I received from my parents when I went to college… the one that’s almost as old as I am and yes, you’d think that we’d have replaced it by now). Oh well.

For now, the TV will stay on the coffee table that Ben received from his parents when he moved into his first apartment… the one that used to hold his Commodore 64. The DVD player, cable box, Wii and topless modded Xbox (Ben doesn’t want to replace the lid for some reason unbeknownst to me) will continue to sit on the carpet until we find that TV stand somewhere else or, probably, change our minds and pursue a different one.

The problem was that I still had a $30 gift card to use before it expired yesterday. That was from a billing problem we had, and the girl who issued it wrote 9-3-2006 on it by mistake, even though it was issued in March 2007. I was prepared to fight the cashier if necessary. I had another gift card for a forgotten amount, procured through some crap “cash rebate” promotion that earned us another gift card 6 months after buying the TV in the first place.

So I called Ben (who stayed home to clean the storage room because he didn’t need to go because we knew exactly what we were going to buy) and we decided to purchase a second DVD player. One that upconverts. So now we can move our old one up to the still-quite-nice-but-not-HD 27″ tube TV. That will be nice.

Ben did some quick review research of the models available and we decided on the Sony DVP-NS77H and are pleased after testing it with portions of Pixar’s Cars and Star Wars Episode 3. Though it still didn’t make the Padme/Anakin “So love has blinded you?” balcony scene tolerable.

I think this player will hold us over until the HD format war is finished and prices come down on the HD players and DVDs.

Enough about TV stuff. I need to get moving and get to work. I’m still sick… though it’s mostly in my chest now. I have a pretty bad cough. Bad enough for Ben to go out and buy me some Robitussin, which has been helping. Though I hate artificially cherry flavored anything, and that’s the only flavor Robitussin has. Well, I don’t like artificially fruit flavored anything, really, so I’d probably lose out no matter what the fruit. I don’t even like Jolly Ranchers. Anyway, Ben reported that all the cough syrup is available on the shelves, even though labels clearly state alcohol levels up to 10% on the bottle. WTF?

No wonder kids are experimenting with cough syrup these days. But they still can’t buy 0.5% alcohol O’Douls beer until they’re 21, and all Claritin-D purchases are recorded on the Big Brother file to monitor illegal drug manufacturing (which can probably look worse if you’ve also got severe allergies). Not that it’s ever affected me directly, but I’m glad there aren’t any holes in our government’s drug rules and policies.

Who am I to complain? I got my cough syrup and I’m expectorating as expected.