Well, if I seemed to be declaring victory over disease in my last post, it was premature. I won't go into all the details, but while most of my symptoms got a lot better, I developed a stiff neck, and the doctors decided I might maybe have meningitis and should have a spinal tap to see. (As you might expect, googling "spinal tap" gives you a lot more about the fun band/movie than about the less fun procedure; even "is a spinal tap painful" doesn't quite purify the results.)

I was pretty freaked out about the spinal tap, but the procedure itself wasn't really so bad; like a lot of surgery under local anesthetic, the initial needle hurts a lot but most of the rest is just conceptually freaky. The worst part was actually that I had a "spinal headache" for the next day--absolutely excruciating (though it went away entirely on sitting down, so I was horizontal a lot of the time). I'm taking fluids, of course, but also caffeine at ridiculously high (doctor-recommended) doses to keep the spinal headache getting better, and so now I'm having occasional caffeine-induced heart palpitations. I guess you could call these palpitations a side-effect of treating a side-effect of a procedure to diagnose a disease I don't have, and then it starts to sound a bit ridiculous.... And for good measure I have an unrelated eye infection, which happily is almost gone.

So after all that sad, here are more pictures from our trip to Poughkeepsie. First, Claire at the gardens of the Samuel Morse Home right outside of town:



Sara and the Lordly Hudson:



Life imitating art at the Storm King outdoor art center:



And Claire interacting artistically with an Andy Goldsworthy piece: