Okay. So, it seems that I’ve come down with the flu. Brandon has been sick since last Wednesday, sweating and shivering and coughing, and by Friday evening, it had felled me too. Unless you count scrambled eggs and a half-hearted batch of tomato sauce, we have cooked absolutely nothing in the past five days. On the upside, however, we’ve done a first-rate job of filling the sink with dirty dishes.

Let me tell you, you know it’s bad when you eat cold pizza and ice cream for lunch, and you don’t even enjoy it. Or when you spend two days sitting on the couch, watching nature documentaries, a mafia movie, the Oscars pre-red carpet show, the Oscars red carpet show, the Oscars, and one and a half episodes of Law & Order, and everything, every last whale flipper and pockmarked mobster and close-up of bejeweled cleavage, makes you want to cry. Even Diablo Cody made me sob a little, because she seems like the kind of girl I would have wanted to know in high school, and by god, she made it big. Needless to say, it was a full weekend.

So I hope you’ll take a rain check? An IOU? I’ll even pay interest. Hell, I’ll pay interest in euros. You won’t be sorry.

Because assuming that we can peel ourselves out of our flannel pajamas, Brandon and I are going out of town tomorrow. To Europe. For two weeks. We’ve been planning it since early December, when our friend Olaiya stumbled upon some cheap(!) tickets(!) online. The three of us started to plot and scheme, and before we knew it, we’d booked tickets to Brussels. Olaiya lived there for four years and has been itching to show us her old haunts, and anyway, I can’t say no to a country that’s famous for waffles.

Plus, it’s a handy excuse for me and Brandon to go to Paris, just a hop, skip, and a train ride away. We’ve never been there together, and since much of our early bonding consisted, gag-worthily enough, of gushing about macarons and Pierre Hermé, it seems that we’re long overdue. And he claims that the baguettes from his favorite boulangerie can run circles around the baguettes from my favorite boulangerie, so a showdown is clearly in order. Anyway, what’s the use of a savings account if you can’t deplete it in one fell swoop? That’s what I’m saying. That, and that I need a vacation. And a Kleenex.

I hope you’ll understand. I had wanted to leave you with something better than dirty dishes – ideally this and this, in fact, which I ate on a recent visit to Portland and is possibly the most brilliant dessert ever – but I can’t. I’m so sorry. Really.

I’ll be back soon enough, though, with waffles, buttery pastry, and wine to share. And without the flu. I hope.