I get up, feed the cats, make some eggs for the still-sleeping boys, make a cup of tea in my broad-bottomed ship’s mug.  Listen to the quiet of the early morning.

All last week I had a fever off and on, at one point so severe that I was experiencing tiny bouts of that minor aphasia you get when single words stop making sense, when textures feel alien and everything is charged with strangeness.

Neil Young claims to have written Cowgirl in the Sand, Down by the River, and Cinnamon Girl while he ran a temperature of nearly 40 degrees Celsius (103 F).  I wish I had never heard this story, as it has haunted my unproductive chilled and shivering attempts to sleep off every fever since.  All I could do was read, but what I read was wonderful: In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin. 

Were he alive today, Chatwin would be one of the world’s most celebrated bloggers.  In Patagonia is a travel book, but there is only the thinnest of narrative arcs to this work.  It’s a blog. A big, beautiful set of perfect small chapters that capture, perfectly observed, a character or a piece of landscape or a scene from history — be it a mystery about Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid’s travels, the natural history of the Mylodon, the migrations of early human beings in South America, or the shipwreck adventures of the man on whom Coolidge modelled his Ancient Mariner.  Each chapter a box crafted so finely, it snaps shut with a satisfying click.

Beyond that, the accomplihsments of my week were few.

I did a little digital gardening. I removed “brianfitfriends” from Twitter.  This was a feed of my friends’ Facebook Status messages, via twitterfeed.  Unfortunately, it was also an automated Facebook privacy settings violation mechanism.  Status messages in Facebook are private to your friends, unless someone thoughtlessly decides to broadcast them out into the TwitterScape.  Whoops. Sorry, friends.

I installed Tweetdeck. YES! Tweetdeck just lays out all your incoming tweets, tweet responses, and direct messages in a convenient layout.  It also chirps nicely.

And have a look at what’s new over in the right hand column under the Recent Readers panel. I could not get MyBlogLog’s WordPress Widget, or their javascript snippet, working properly on my new design.  It got stuck on the same three visitors and wouldn’t move for weeks.  Then I found this nifty alternative from Postworthy with a really great bonus:  If you click on Community, you’ll get a nice graphic map of the networks of your visitors within the MyBlogLog community.

The other thing I did with my week, of course, was fall horribly behind at work.  Which now beckons.