For breakfast this fine Saturday, I had *two* pieces of peanut butter on toast with Gatorade. That is a return to near perfect normalcy.

Perhaps I never noticed it when I was younger, but the thing about getting sick when you're in your 30s (late 30s at that) is that each bout starts to eat up more time.

Yes, I noted in a previous post that one of my great December 2007 moments was my bout with a stomach virus, or the stomach flu as most call it.

I'm not sure how you can avoid the stomach flu. Sure, I know to wash my hands, blah, blah, blah. I also know not to touch your own eyes, nose or mouth, and I avoid contact with strangers. I don't like handshakes, and I'm not a chronic hugger or kisser.

Bottom line is that, for me, a stomach virus should be a freak occurrence. I hadn't had an actual bout of gastroenteritis in more than a decade, if not two decades. But when it hits, it hits, and it pretty much kills an entire week.

On Monday, I got home from Radio Shack in Henryetta, and I immediately noted that I was cold. Freezing. Achy. By that night, I had a fever, and by the next night, I couldn't hold anything down.

The primary reason I mention all this without grossing you out with details is to note the fine work of my personal physician. I won't name my personal physician under the precept that if he doesn't talk about me by name to strangers, I won't talk about him. He's actually a terrific doc and a good guy. He's given me a prostate exam; we know each other.

But I think he was trying to kill me with the anti-nausea medicine he gave me.

It's called promethazine. To be fair, he said it would make me sleepy. However, I didn't realize it would send me off to the other side of the island (Gilligan reference) for almost 24 hours. This stuff is at least as potent as Benadryl if not more so. Holy moly.

However, to be fair, I didn't get sick at my stomach again, and the virus worked its way out of me, and by late Friday, I was as good as new.

Given that I had zero cable, I watched a lot of my Season 1 DVD of One Tree Hill. I know. WTF does that highly addictive teenybopper show from the WB have anything to do with a stomach virus?

Insert joke here, friends.

No, there was a line in one of the earliest episodes in which Lucas notes how people "promise to appreciate normal so much more when they have the flu," or something like that. I had never really heard that said before, but I had always thought it.

And given that I've had no electricity, no cable, no Web, that I have had to work a ton extra and that I had a stomach virus to cap it off, I'm looking forward to normalcy more than ever.