Well, faithful Night Note readers, I’m going to be away from my desk for the week, because I’ve got a case of benign positionally induced vertigo — an inner ear problem in which calcium crystals form in your inner ear, shift around when you turn your head a certain way and make your brain think the world around it is spinning violently — for about 30 seconds at a pop. In between bouts of vertigo, sometimes there’s a kind of verge-of-vertigo swimmy feeling. You can imagine, this makes working at the computer a little like reading in the back seat of a car on a twisty road — sort of sickening.

I’ve never had this before and it just started in the middle of the night, but my doc tells me there’s a pretty easy, if nauseating, procedure with a 98% “cure” rate, in which an ear specialist will put me through a series of tests and head movements to shift the calcium to an area of the ear where it won’t be interpreted by my brain as the world in a corkscrew roll.

The plus side is that it is easy, the down side is that it is a 3-hour procedure and I couldn’t get an appointment with the ear-specialist until next Tuesday. So for the next few days, there will only be short bouts on the machine, and lots and lots of sitting still to avoid the barfing. I’ll let you know how that works for me.