I’d been sick off and on for a couple of weeks. By the end of last week my last bits of resistance failed, so finally I couldn’t ignore it any longer: I had to rest up and try to recover. I did a lot of sleeping, and when I was awake I stayed in bed.
My cats thought this was marvelous. How lovely to have a new nap companion! And one who, thanks to a low-running fever, was always toasty warm to snuggle up to.
My cat Max doesn’t generally nap on the bed — he hangs out either on my desk chair or at the top of the car tree. The main time he uses the bed during daytime is to hide when any neighbors make noise and when people come to visit. Then he dashes to the far side of the bed and worms his way under the covers, so he can hide.
Like this. He’s the lump at the upper right. He seems to have worked his way over there from an entry point at the lower left — you can see his trail, kind of like a molehill.
For these precious days when I stayed abed, Max hung out on top of the covers, and the other cats arranged themselves so the four of us each had space, kind of like the four grandparents in bed in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
When I wasn’t sleeping, I found I could work a bit. A laptop computer is a marvelous thing. I was able to address a couple of customer support issues, migrate some websites, answer email, grade an assignment, and complete a few other tasks. I couldn’t really code or design, for lack of a full desktop setup, but I kept a few balls in the air.
Working in bed turned out to be quite lovely, cozy and warm. The change of venue, even though it was just from one end of the apartment to the other, made the experience seem new and special, and I felt that I had some creative ideas that I might not have had otherwise. (That might have been just delirium from fever though.) I didn’t bring the power cord from my desk, and whenever the battery ran out that was my cue to take the computer back to charge up, and to settle myself down for a nap. It was quite a workable system.
I’m toying with the idea of having a work-from-bed day now and again, perhaps even when I’m not sick. As Tolstoy said, “True life is lived when tiny changes occur.” In bed.