so here's my monthly post kind of explaining the recent absence
I got an upper respiratory thing at Easter which meant I had to skip multiple doses of multiple arthritis meds (under doctor's care -- not on my own) in order to decrease likelihood of pneumonia.
Skipping doses of arthritis meds led to arthritis flare (not really unexpected).
So pretty much the choice was high chance of pneumonia or painful, swollen joints. Since pneumonia decreases breathing capacity and has a greater mortality than swollen joints, the lesser of two evils was swollen joints.
The swollen joints decreased my ability to type or write (and other things weren't so easy either) leading to an incomplete for Qualitative Research Methods, no posting on my blog, no geocaching even though there are new caches less than 0.2 miles away, lack of sleep, and extreme fatigue. The coursework is still not completed but the arthritis is not interfering as much anymore since the meds are kicking in (every pun intended).
And even this abbreviated version of the story feels like "The house that Jack built."