A Week of "offness"

It's at this point where a writer gets a bit annoyed: an entire week of vacation--no writing, no blog, no...eeeekk! I'm a failure.
Okay, angst aside, we continue the story:
Last week's runs were regular (okay, that's an amusing little sentence, isn't it?). Weather was decent and the runs were strong. I'm through Chapter 14 in The Broker and like the other Grisham novels that I've read or listen to, it's been nice company.
Last week also brought to close the end of the 2nd trimester with finals and last minute "What's my grades" from students.
Sunday came, and the body reminded me of Multability and I was down with the flu for 2 days. I still played Sunday a.m. and started the new trimester Monday, but did a lot of sleeping during the day and quite icky sleeping during the night. Much waking, little serious REMs.
Poop!
(Don't let my son see that word, okay?)
I'm bummed about missing two runs within 4 days, so hopefully tomorrow will be some nice icing on the cake (not in a "MacArthur Park" kind of a way, just as long as it doesn't take too much time to get back in the groove.==>confession...I only used the "icing" reference because I thought it would be cute to include an obscure reference and seeing how I've already mentioned the song in an earlier post, it would seem to the ordinary reader that I have lots of time to rehash the same thing over and over again).
I digress.
My neighbor's daughter died yesterday after a 2 1/2 year battle with cancer. Beautiful girl, incredible struggle, and ... what do you say at a point such as this? She was in hospice care and her mother has carried on an honest wording of the season in their lives via a blog. I suppose I am reminded again of being human and it's limitations. I continue to drive by their house in the mornings and evening trying to imagine how different their world is from my own. Peace to you, hurting souls.
My mind has been looping the line from Tennyson's poem, "Ulysses":
"I am a part of all I've met"...but I will copy and paste via really cool combo key-stroking the passage around it...enjoy:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
(lines 19-32)