This post is mostly about barfing.

Hello all! From my limited exposure to travel diaries out there, there always seems to be a pattern. It begins with frequent writing and good intentions, is followed by a steady decline in entries with diminishing detail and is finally ended on some anticlimactic note to the effect of "Wow! hard to believe it's been November since we've written. Where to start!? Last week a monkey took Dan's glasses while we were at a temple and broke them! Tomorrow, we are taking a break from our week of fire juggling classes here and going to the local hot springs." And in their defense, I can now see the pitfalls clearly. Either you find yourself falling behind a day, then two, and suddenly the chocolates are coming so fast down the conveyor belt that you're just stuffing them in your mouth to keep things from falling apart, or you start wondering how much time you have to reflect on things as they're happening and filter them down to a series of grammatically acceptable entries on a computer whose cord never seems to fit in the socket on the wall. By my abacus, it takes about 10% of the trip. But in truth, neither of those are my excuses.

Apologies in the lapse to [both of] you reading the journal, but in all honesty, I've actually been out of commission, seeing a neat line of evil-doing viral, bacterial and electromagnetic guests take categorical plunder of my tender frame. Let me start by saying it had been a long while since I literally projectile vomited. Maybe some fuzzy pubescent experiment mixing gin and raspberry cider? I can't say. But after a cyclone of severe food poisoning whirled through our apartment, I can tell you it's almost comically vulgar. Regular puking I am totally OK with. I've long stood by a chinese/roman policy which decrees that if your body doesn't want something in it anymore, don't argue; be discreet, get it out of there and then get back on the horse. But those rules of composure went out the window like a defenestrating stream of stomach bile.
As a defensive preamble, after about a month here, I can safely say that Sri Lanka kind of puts out the welcoming mat for food contamination. If it would please the jury to examine exhibits "A" through "F": Not a ton of refrigeration; a hand-to-mouth meal delivery method; a profusion of luke-warm milk products; a field guide of origin-questionable meats; a country-wide extinction of public hand soap, and a huge question mark sitting with its head between its knees where toilet hygiene should be. All in all, I really shouldn't have been surprised to have been watering our hedge mid-sentence with a firetrucksworth of leaf-withering stomach acid, but there I was. It probably just looked like I paused to search for the right word, maybe a little confused; pensive, my eyes rolling back and lips tight, then, like a regurgitory express train from Sicksville, USA- HuUUUUUURRRRRGGGGGGAAAAAAgggGGHHHHHPphhhhlll. We're talking official Ghostbusters (TM) arc of radioactive throwup. This surprise party continued in my guts for about 60 hours. I was the last to go. AT ralphed first in the house, and Barnaby was hit mid-business meeting, managing to excuse himself in time to a rubbish bin in a hallway. Me, I was the Magellan of retching: I tossed up in our alley in the shrubbery, spewed out of a moving tuk tuk, hurled up and down a resort-laden beachside and totally lost it on the sand floor of an outdoor chinese restaurant.

So I was food poisoned for a good 3 days, which crippled my immune system, which opened me up for 3 days of old fashioned stomach flu, which shapeshifted into a further 5 days of bronchial/sinus misery, during the second of which I fell asleep alone in the sun on cold medication for 4 hours, which led to the worst sunburn I've ever experienced, which prevented me from walking normally for a week, and which, 10 days from conception still looks like someone painted my thighs with cadmium red acrylic. So that's where I've been! How are you? Trust that I'm feeling better and have barrels of photos and stories, so I'll get back to posting post-haste. Talk soon.