What a night.  Couldn't sleep much because my temperature kept rising and falling.  I'd wake up freezing and pile on the blankets and even put on a warm jacket and then an hour later I'd wake up boiling.  I took 1000mg of Tylenol right before bed, plus Robitussin CF.  The cough syrup really does suppress the coughing but it does nothing for the fever.  My wife encourages me to take Tylenol Cold with the cough syrup but two of those is only 700mg of Tylenol, so I figure I'm better off taking the syrup and the regular Tylenol caplets for now.

When I get a fever, my mind becomes pretty flighty and I often find myself reasoning out thoroughly a completely ridiculous proposition as if it were true… especially when I am on the edge of sleep.  And last night, for example, I spent many edge-of-sleep moments mulling the fact that the polygons that make up my body each contained too much heat.  The proper thing to do of course was to take my mouse and select these polygons and then edit them to remove the excess heat.  The problem was figuring out how to get all the polygons selected at once.  Apparently there are multiple kinds of polygons in my body and they can't all be selected at once, and selecting only a few at a time is useless because it would take forever and the heat would just redistribute itself. Finally at 3 AM it occurred to me that this notion was nonsense, stop thinking about that crap and go to sleep, I said to myself.

In my sleeping moments I had the most peculiar dream.  It actually makes a halfway decent if odd story.  I was in college again, but for some reason, college was in Michigan (I attribute this to noting a Michigan license plate in a movie I watched recently).  Strangely, James, my trusted college compatriot was also there, and another person who was our friend, but I could not remember his name and every time I looked at him, his face was a blur.  So for now, I'll call him “Blur”.  The only thing I remember about blur was that he worked for the school paper.

We were enrolled in a humanities course on archeology, got to get those Humanities credits if you want to graduate with a degree in Comp Sci.  The professor, a gray haired old fellow whose name escapes me, took the whole class out on assignment to a local historic spot that he had gotten permission to dig at.  It was at a rest stop by the side of a Michigan highway.  The rest stop was basically a dirt half circle, on the edge of a pond, with a stone structure near the water, mostly hidden by brush.  It was like the circle of stones that forms a covered well standing about 3.5 feet high and about 3.5 feet in diameter.

The professor explained that this cylindrical structure was built by the prehistoric ancestors of a local Indian tribe.  I don't remember the tribe's name.  The cylinder was full of dirt and a vine-covered tree had grown in it at one time, and this tree was important to these early people for some sort of rituals.  I don't remember most of what he said, but he went on to say that when Europeans settled the area and discovered the tree was used for rituals (which to them were Satanic, since they weren't Christian), they had chopped the tree down.

We were going to dig in and around this structure, which was now partially obscured by brush on the sides and top.  So we cleared the brush away for starters, which revealed the relatively small tree stump and a tangle of vines sprouting from it still bearing leaves.  I remarked that I was amazed the tree was still clinging to life and the professor said we would dig around it.  It occurred to me that with the brush cleared, the tree might actually be able to grow again, and that made me happy.

Then the digging began, gently scraping away soil with trowels and brushing it away with brushes.  We found some small shards of pottery and a clay pipe, and the professor noted that it looked like the soil had been disturbed recently.  That's when we uncovered something that definitely did not belong.  It was a Maine license plate, 682 HG, buried in the soil.  The professor snatched it up disgustedly and flung it away.  Why would someone bury a license plate?  I wondered… I was curious about it so I grabbed it and stuck it in my pack.

For each item uncovered James and I were to write a small report, and I forget why, but for some reason the professor didn't like our reports.  I think he felt we Comp Sci majors were unwelcome invaders in his class.  He made some noise about them not being thorough enough, or some such thing.  And he refused to grade them, and further, refused to explain what exactly we needed to do to fix them, leaving us pretty much in the lurch, with no choice but to keep trying.

Each day we returned to the dig site and did more work uncovering more stuff, and all the while the professor refused to explain what he wanted in these reports.  We had checked our textbooks and had formatted the reports as suggested therein, using Mac Write to carefully lay them out.  They looked as though they wouldn't appear out of place in the book themselves.  The only thing different about them is that they were done on the computer instead of written by hand in a notebook.

It turned out, our professor finally admitted, that this is why he would not accept them.  “True archaeologists don't use computers.” he said, accenting the word with distaste.  Clearly the professor was a technophobic nut-job.  I found his argument to be a ridiculous statement in the extreme, utter bullshit, James agreed and we told the professor so.  We had both seen documentaries on TV where archaeologists used computers to catalog or scan finds and so forth.  Our friend Blur concurred.

The professor countered that the reports HAD to be in our lab notebooks.  Okay, fine, James said, and I could tell he was about to deliberately misinterpret the teacher's intentions, just to piss him off, I'll paste these report pages to the pages of my notebook.  That should be acceptable, right?  Because it will be in my notebook.

I didn't think this was going to fly with the professor, and I was right.  It just made him angry.  He said that it was not acceptable to which James immediately and sharply shot back “why?” repeatedly.  At that age James loved to catch someone in their own illogical arguments and then needle them over it, never backing down.  At least, if memory serves.  I always both admired this trait and feared it, because I was afraid it would get him into trouble.  But he survived into adulthood relatively unscathed so I guess my fears were unfounded.

Finally the professor told us that if we didn't want to flunk the course, we would write the reports by hand using an engineering pencil in our notebooks as all of his students had done in the past.  James' argument that archaeologists should study the past, not live in it landed on deaf ears.  We were simply going to have to rewrite them and that was that.

The next day at the dig site there was a bunch of students I didn't recognize protesting.  They were holding up signs and everything.  At first I thought they were protesting the dig for some reason, but it turned out they were protesting the professor for refusing to move with the times and accept reports in the superior digital format.  Blur mentioned to James, Sorry I got the paper involved, to which James said, Are you kidding?  This is great!

I didn't know what they were talking about until Blur handed me the latest copy of the school paper, open to a particular article that immediately caught my eye.  Apparently the student in charge of taking photographs of the dig and the finds, had also shot pictures of the students.  And there was a picture of me, James, and Blur in the paper.  My back was to the camera, Blur was partially obscured behind James, and James was sipping something from a plastic cup and grinning, looking charming with his close-cropped hair, glasses, and bomber-style jacket.  In the background was the dig site and the professor with his back turned toward us.  The article said “Professor Unfairly Threatens to Flunk Students”, and went on to describe the situation in unflattering terms.

Needless to say the professor was livid.  He began by accusing me of arranging the whole thing and I said I hadn't known anything about it.  Then he accused James, to which James calmly replied that he too hadn't had anything to do with it, but noted that people don't just sit by when they see someone behaving in an unjust manner.  Certainly we had told other people that he had threatened to flunk us, but we never went to the paper.  Obviously someone had, but not us.  The photographer, upon questioning, said that the paper had called him and asked for pictures of the dig because they were going to write an article about it.  They hadn't mentioned anything about his threatening to flunk us, and so he had happily supplied copies of all of the pictures, figuring the professor would be pleased.

Nobody would admit to anything, and the professor was becoming more and more belligerent.  He actually screamed at an older guy in the class who was apparently back in school in his 40's trying to finally get that degree, something about the proper way to use a trowel.  The guy's name was something Jenkins… his first name began with a D.  And when the professor started yelling at him Jenkins began to look positively scary, like he would snap the smaller man's neck.

After class the professor announced that he was canceling the remainder of the dig.  All reports would be due in his office in the morning, done by hand in notebooks, no later than 8 AM. He knew this meant James and I would be up all night, and clearly relished the idea.  James and I knew that he would be merciless when he graded our reports, and by all accounts no matter how good they were, he would flunk us.

James assured me that the fight wouldn't be over just because he flunked us, and that in the end he would get the grade overturned.  Nonetheless, at this point we needed to play by the professor's rules or it would be harder to get the grade overturned, and we needed to do an excellent job.  So we went to the library and poured on the research.  The library was apparently open 24 hours a day, so we pretty much camped out there, adding all sorts of details to our reports.

James wickedly suggested that we should write a report on the license plate too.  After all, it was found at the dig site and the professor said all finds had to be documented.  The professor wouldn't like it, but I had definitely reached the “fuck him” stage at that point.

In addition I did background research on the vicinity of the rest stop and came across an article in a local newspaper dated ten years prior.  It was an appeal from the state police for information on the whereabouts of D(something) Jakes.  Apparently Mr. Jakes had murdered his family in Maine and fled without a trace.  The police had only one lead in that a couple days later a trooper had spotted a car with Maine plates pulling into the rest stop where the dig site was at about 2 AM.  The officer in the cruiser was off duty, and didn't note the plate number, just that it was a Maine plate.  He pulled up next to the vehicle, rolled down his window and asked the other driver if he was alright.  To which the 30 year old responded, yeah, I'm just tired and I'm going to catch some sleep.

That was good enough to the officer who said drive safe and left. Only later did the officer read a bulletin on Jakes, and wasn't sure but thought the man he had spoken to the day before might have been Jakes.  Hence the appeal for information.  But none was forthcoming.  I went looking for more information on Jakes and found a couple more appeals for information in later years.  Clearly the trail had gone cold.

And I was probably holding his license plate in my hands.  Then it occurred to me that D(something) Jenkins was an anagram of D(something) Jakes.  I shared all this with my friend James who went wide-eyed and noted that Jenkins had almost certainly seen me pick up the plate.  We reasoned that he had possibly ditched his car, maybe dumping it in the pond, or had switched out the plates or something.  This explained why the plate had been buried.

We have to go to the police, he said, right now.

That's when I woke up, and when I went back to sleep the dream did not return.  My wife told me in the morning that I had been swearing in my sleep all night. She said every other phrase out of my mouth had been “eff you”.  I told her I was angry at my archeology professor and that got a look as strange as one might expect.

100.5 is my temp now.  I'm so miserable.