A bad cold

Well, first of all, I have just published a post from about two weeks ago that I thought I had set to publish automatically on Dec. 2. I'm not sure why it didn't publish, but I wonder if I didn't get the calendar setting wrong and maybe it thought I meant Feb. 12!
Meanwhile, I've got a cold. It started last Thursday, with a little tickle in my throat -- the famous post-nasal drip. I have now learned that taking the anti-cold medicine that stops the dripping was probably the worst thing I could have done. It seemed to be working for 3 of the 4 days, but by the 4th day I started coughing anyway. It's a horrible cough. On Monday, I went to the doctor and I've got full-fledged sinusitis and the cough with an antibiotic. I should have just let the cold develop normally at its own pace. On the bright side, I've lost some weight!
Monday evening there was an AARO meeting. The theme was Inheritance in France, but because France and the US signed their inter-governmental agreement on FATCA, we added that to the meeting agenda. It was a great meeting, with a good audience turnout, and the summary of it should be up on the AARO website, soon, I hope. There should also be a video of it.
Our street is all dug up. They are preparing to put all the telephone lines underground. Would you believe that when we bought this house almost thirty years ago, we planned for the soon-to-come underground lines by putting in cable tubes? Unfortunately, in the 30-year wait, they got plugged up and are not where the phone company wants to actually enter the property, so we'll have to dig up another part of the front yard next year when the cables finally are scheduled to be laid. There will be two cables: phone and fiber optic, so we should get really fast internet service, too. As a bonus, the street will be completely resurfaced, not just patched up. That sounds great, but we reminded the city that the water company had come through last year to tell us what we had to do to prepare for the new dual sewer system (one for used water, one for rain drain-off) and that they were supposed to dig up the street in 2014! It's a shame our newly resurfaced street won't last long. We're sure the sewer work will get us patches, not a completely new surface. Maybe they'll do the sidewalks, though!
We're getting ready for Christmas. We'll probably get a tree at the end of this week. We'll have the family, minus the English branch, this year. They'll be celebrating at home and in Woking and we'll go up to them just after the new year.
That's enough for today.