Today's Bridge: Kevin joined us to make up our four, and he was my partner, but I wasn't playing my best. I missed the winning defense at least twice and took us out of a great 4S game into an unmakeable slam. (To be fair, I was attempting to cue-bid as an invitation, but we had three losers on top in the black suits.) I got to declare 2H with S A-Q-x H Q-9-x-x-x D x C J-10-x-x facing S K-10-x H A-K-J D Q-J-x-x-x C 8-7 with an opening bid in clubs to my left. To be fair, 4H seems like a bad contract to me, depending heavily on a 3-2 trump split if opponents attack clubs early. The lead was a spade, though, and I put in the ten just for the heck of it. It held, but I took the queen anyway and led the diamond, intending to play for a dummy reversal, just because. Ken covered my queen and led a club to the ace, and back came the king and another club. I had to ruff, putting an end to the reversal, but I ruffed out the diamonds anyway - a low ruff, crossing to the king of hearts, another low ruff, dropping the ace of diamonds, and back to the ace of hearts, everyone following. All I had to do then was cross back to the ace of spades to pull the last trump, and I had a top club and a top diamond to go with my top spade - shame I could only take two of them.

Today's Work: I woke up with a bad enough headache that even though critical stuff was going on at work, I felt it would be prudent to take the day off. That didn't fly with the project lead, though, and I had no way to submit the paperwork to do my work from home, so I took a bunch of medicine and drove in anyway. I stayed long enough to do what I had to do, then came home, but by that time, resting was largely out of the question. So I placed a big manga order online and finally remembered to order CPAP supplies shortly before they closed.

I can only hope that I won't still have problems tomorrow. I think it's just really bad allergies, but I didn't feel up to buying allergy medicine after work. If it's bad again tomorrow, I should have no problem taking the day off and dealing with it then.