Thanks to everyone who's emailed or commented supportively. Jeff in particular, thank you for a much needed laugh, and I too hope that what I actually have is Nullable<Cancer>. Also Jeroen and Mark for the thoughtful emails, Jim for the comment on his own blog, and everyone at work and everyone I know in person for their thoughts and prayers (I may not believe in prayer personally, but I appreciate the thought from people who do).

I arrived at work this morning to find that lots of people were sick with colds, headaches, etc - and that's not including the people who were out sick. The conversation went something like...

Coworker 1: "We're all a bunch of invalids today..."
Me: "Well, I have cancer -- I win!"
Coworker 2: "My husband's sick and he's also having a colonoscopy"
Me: "I have cancer -- I still win!"
Coworker 2: "Fair enough"

Normally when I or members of the family are sick I'll struggle through and work from home, or sometimes feel guilty and leave Janene to suffer while I go into the office because there's stuff that simply needs me to do it. But right now even when I'm in the office I can't really focus, and besides, if there's anything in life that entitles you to take advantage and take a little bit of a break to recuperate, it's having cancer.

So for the rest of this week I've pledged that I'm not going to feel obligated to get any work done. That's not to say I won't do anything that will benefit my work, but I'll focus on stuff I want to do with long-term benefits, rather than the never-ending stream of kludgy customer-specific fixes that drive my stress levels through the roof at the best of times.

(By the way, this means among other things that I won't be receiving any @netreach.com email - if you want to reach me, use the gmail address at the bottom of every page of my site)

So here's a list of projects, work-related and not, that I intend to attempt over the next few days:

• Get japitools handling some JDK5.0 features. I've started this already - I have a version of japicompat that can theoretically cope with a lot of the "interim" japi file spec version 0.9.7 that supports some, but not all, of the 5.0 features. Unfortunately I don't have any way of creating japi files in that format: Jeroen, if you're reading this, do you have any tips on how to get the necessary metadata out of the class files?
• Get nrdo integrated into the new Visual Studio 2005 beta in the cleanest possible way. This means using List<T> everywhere, nullable types everywhere (an act of faith that these will be adequate by final release) and somehow hooking it into the build system in such a way that, hopefully, we don't require two separate extra project files and to rebuild the whole thing twice just to pick up the generated code.
• Produce a release of NRobot to include the new security code, and announce it in enough places that perhaps some people will try producing robot implementations...
  
• Watch all three LotR extended editions, especially RotK which I've never seen even the standard edition of.
• Continue to push the nullable type issue with Microsoft any way I can find.
• Learn as much as possible about Visual Studio 2005 and how the migration will impact cmScribe. I think that actually doing a migration will take longer than the few days I have, but hopefully I can at least figure out what the biggest issues will be.
• Catch up on DVR'd TV shows that I haven't watched yet.
• Oh yeah, recover from the surgery...