Just a Couple of Post-Dengue Factoids:

1)  I haven't had any alcohol for 14 days.  Tonight I celebrated my sobriety with a glass of wine.  I didn't even want it, but I've never been a "quitter".  Sadly, it may have been months, nay, years since I remember going 14 days without alcohol.

2)  Bridget and I had a little wager regarding how much weight I lost with the Dengue.  In my opinion, surely I had lost 27 pounds, but I put my money on 15, trying to be modest.  She was thinking maybe more like five, since I was eating even when at my sickest.  I figured without the alcohol, and only being able to eat a bowl of soup most days that I was at probably around 36 pounds lost.  I weighed myself at 138.5 pounds sometime on the 6th day of Dengue at the Pharmacy.  Today I went to the same Pharmacy and re-weighed.  134.5.  Four pounds lost.  I still maintain that I probably weighed something like 144 at the start (remember I weighed in at 144 in North Carolina, but with shoes and purse?) and that since I've been eating well now for four days, I probably did lose about 47 pounds, but then gained some back to make it look like I only lost four pounds.  The problem is I don't even want to weigh 134.5 pounds, so I need to learn some new great strategy for weight loss.  One that doesn't involve getting a strange tropical disease, because THAT'S not workin' for me.  Maybe I'll keep NOT drinking.  Oops.

3)  Despite being warned to "take it easy", I walked/biked 42 blocks yesterday.  The biking was necessitated by the fact that I walked to a friend's house, where Meagan, one of my roommates already was.  She had brought her bike, so when it was time to go home, it was = two girls, one bike.  So we had a brilliant idea that she would give me a "buck" by having me sit on the handlebars, but that doesn't really work when you're not 12 years old and the bike doesn't have foot pegs on the front tire.  Then the solution presented itself in that I would pedal and steer the bike, but she would sit on the seat, and rest her hands on the handlebars with a sort of hug around me.  I haven't laughed so hard in a really long time.  Here we were, two girls riding one bike, laughing the whole way down dark and dangerous cobble-stoned streets in the middle of the city of Esteli, and then the seat broke so I wasn't allowed to hit any more bumps, but there aren't any spots on the road that didn't have any bumps.  Eventually I lost all energy and so we traded and it was my turn to sit on the seat but by then it was so broken that it was completely vertical, threatening to dump me back onto the tire, whereby shoving my crotch into the metal part by way of moving tire.  So we ended up walking it the rest of the way.  Hilarious.  But I decided I had regained much of my lost energy and today I walked another 42 blocks and then some.  So I'm feeling very back to normal other than needing to sleep in every morning.
Dengue be damned!

4)  The night of the party I pinched every zit on the back of my 19-year-old friend Jordan.  It started because I was pinching my zits in the mirror, and then he asked me if that was what I was doing, and then I manipulated him slowly into letting me pinch some blackheads on his face:

EVERY man is hiding blackheads behind his ears.  EVERY. ONE.

and then, "you probably want me to get the zits on your back too?"

and then BAM!

Someday I'll tell you about my grandpa's blackhead.