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Dear friends,

Hell, hell, hell.  Hell r squared.  Hell with walnuts.  Last Thursday I woke up feeling tired and achy.  I spent the morning at work feeling warm and scattershot.  The devil on my left shoulder said, “whoops, don’t fool around with that; how ‘bout we skip the gym and go out for pad Thai instead?” The angel on my right said, “you’re just fooling yourself.  Go to the gym.” Go to the gym I did, where I wondered why my hourlong workout was taking six weeks to finish.

Friday morning I woke up with the kind of cough normally found in chainsmokers, old men and the people who always sit behind me at the theatre.  By this morning it had morphed into a full-blown head & chest one-two punch.  Funny how it’s always “just a cold” until it becomes your cold.

So with much apology, I am postponing tonight’s planned rant about the New York City Transit Authority, as well as the supplementary planned valentine to Nigel Slater, whose new memoir Toast:  The Story of a Boy’s Hunger is my relief-from-research reading.  Once I am back on my feed, I should be good for both of them.  Instead, I plan to eat my umpteenth bowl of chicken soup.  Maybe I’ll follow it up with a little roasted pineapple, roasted in a slow oven with sugar, a scraped vanilla bean and a little butter, good food for a low mood.

In the meantime, I’m going to issue a shameless plea for information, much like the ones one finds in the New York Times Book Review.  If anyone has any information about the Infinity Foundation in Princeton, NJ, please drop me a line.  I have found a book published under their auspices that may be helpful to me in establishing a timeline for poultry domestication, but I can’t seem to find any information about them other than that on their website.  I’d like to find a little independent corroboration before I go ahead and use them as a source.  If you can help me, you will earn my undying gratitude, the baked good of your choice and a big ol’ kiss—as soon as I am not contagious anymore, that is.