I'll be here, on the couch

*cough cough* I've got a bit of a thing coming on. Pretty mild actually, itchy throat, stuffed up head and a hot feeling in my lungs that might turn into a cough. (It's totally not H1N1- I'd have a high fever by now if it was) Odd as it is, I must say, the timing couldn't be better. Really, this is far enough in advance of our Thanksgiving trip to Washington that I'll just scale back my expectations at work, and spend the weekend in my PJs at home- which had been the plan before the cold anyway.

I whipped up a pretty awesome avgolemono last night, which will sustain us through the weekend. The downside is I had been planning to use the weekend to think of some good holiday recipes, and so far I've been through Cooking Light and Everyday Food and I can't quite get excited about any food stuff. Oh, delicious whatever cookies, ethnic something breads, fancy stuff salads... nothing really resonates. But I've got all weekend, and maybe after a run to the pharmacy I'll be in better shape to make the hard choices.

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In our undergrad discussion on Friday, we did this awesome exercise (I can say this because I can take no credit in it) where the students thought about how to best convey information about H1N1 to the general public, or their own friends and family. We watched two videos- the first from NPR, the second is the source of the footage from the biotech Zirus. The first is a fun, topical glance at how viruses cause infection, the second is a hardcore, long science lecture. Some of the students thought the NPR-fun version was too pedantic and uninformative, but mostly we thought the Zirus-lecture wasn't something anyone would willingly watch. My feeling is that the NPR video made science kind of pop- you might watch it because it is short and fun and heck, you might learn something or be interested enough to look up more. The second video, you HAVE to want to learn about viruses. We need both, but probably only the first type gets viewed much. Would you agree?