Fighting A Bug Or The Price Of Age?

     Saturday was a struggle.  My back's been hurting, and by midday Saturday, I had a stomach ache and I was feeling cold.  I kept after my weekend chores but by supper time, my hands were like ice and I was layering on clothes despite the thermostat being set to 73°F.  My knee, elbows and knuckles were aching.

     I went to bed early and ended up adding sweat pants and a T-shirt to my summer-weight nightgown.  After an hour, I put a blanket in top of the covers.  I kept waking up chilled and finally turned the thermostat up a degree.

     Over the course of a long night, my temperature slowly warmed.   I shed covers and layers, and other than my still-sore lower back, I was comfortable with the usual amount of clothing and bedding by cat-feeding time.  I went back to bed and slept for another couple of hours.

     Now I'm down to a sore back and hurting knees.  The knees are just part of the background noise these days; they're not going to get better.

     Was I fighting a bug?  There's a version of the flu making the rounds at work; I got a flu shot. but a near-miss on immunity can sometimes result in being only a little sick while your immune system goes after the virus. 

     Or did I overdo things last week?  There are a couple of power supplies in the widget I'm removing that are essentially overgrown "floor warts," 470-pound behemoths that lurk in the bottom of the amplifier cabinet, turning three-phase 208-Volt AC into 50 Volts at over 100 Amps, a yard long and about a foot square in cross-section.  A pair of smallish steel wheels slightly offset from the center of balance make it possible to move them: you grab a handle bolted to a transformer frame, push down to get the slightly heavier end off the floor, and heave to set the thing rolling.  It's still got all the inertia of 470 pounds, but roller-bearing axles on the wheels and rubber-soled shoes on me go a long way towards getting it to move.  There are a couple of tiny "speed bumps" to cross, trim on the edges of an old wiring-trough cover, so you have to acquire enough speed to keep it the thing from hanging up.  --And all that is done bent way over, hanging onto the handle and keeping the power supply balanced.  It's a recipe for back strain.

     All I can do is rest up and hope to recover, whatever it was.  Moving those power supplies is probably the worst part of my present project, and I made sure to leave them in what I hope will be their long-term storage location.