I suppose it's a well-known fact that large communities such as schools and cubicle-departments are disease incubators. It only takes one to spread something to an entire class; that class can easily pass it to another floor, and before long there's a large-scale outbreak. This school year, I managed to escape two outbreaks of strep throat and one of laryngitis, along with a particularly nasty strain of whooping cough (for which I was identified as a possible infectee and carrier, and thus had to take azithromycin for a week anyway).
On Friday, it seemed that my luck had run out, just in time for an influenza outbreak. Initially I'd thought that this particular strain had been more or less restricted to the faculty, though my SAT preparation class on Saturday showed me otherwise: the entire classroom of thirty sniffed, snorted, sneezed, hacked, and coughed uncontrollably to the point where any passerby might've mistook the class for a doctor's waiting room. What started with a minor cough and nasal congestion in the morning peaked around 6PM, at which point I (out of fatigue, more than anything) went to bed about seven hours earlier than usual.
Since I've more or less been useless these past few days, I took advantage of my free time to finish up AP applications, fill out a W-4 for work, and install Debian Linux on a few of my machines. Debian is as close to a Linux vanilla install I'm willing to go: you get a complete 250mb CLI system to which I can then add whatever other packages I need (in my case: X11, IceWM, gedit, and Dillo). Overall, both Debian 3.1 systems work out to 375mb, while my more-functional Debian 4 install (X11, XFCE, Epiphany, and AbiWord) comes in around 600mb.