So it turns out that the paranoid-looking woman wearing the germ mask all the way from Albuquerque to LAX on Sunday may have had the right idea after all. Yesterday afternoon I received the confirmation call from my family doctor that, yes, I was the proud owner of a body chock full of an active H1N1 virus.

During the course of this revelation, I kept Dr. Karan on the phone a bit longer than was necessary, not so much due to my anxiety over the swine flu but because he has the same mellifluous accent of the Indian nerd genius Raj, on the “Big Bang Theory,” who I find completely charming.

Despite still feeling like I have a brick at the bottom of each lung, I have suffered through far worse cases of flu. And that means I am a very lucky girl. The fever appears to have abated, and my idea to prop myself up on about 100 pillows at night was probably a good way to combat the bronchial problems that have made my chest perpetually sound like I am rattling a stack of papers.

Both of my anxious dogs calmed down today. Over the weekend, they trailed me fretfully, as I reeled between bedroom and bathroom. Apparently, the animals have stopped worrying about me, so I guess I can stop worrying about me.

The trick now is to keep the rest of the family in good health. I brought my son to the doctor’s office for the nasal vaccine on the same day I came down with the Swine Flu. Here’s hoping he got the viral weapon soon enough. Since he takes a bus to college and to his job at a supermarket, and since his best friend already exposed him to the flu a couple of weeks ago, Jake already has been thrown to the germ wolves and appears to have emerged unscathed.

My husband, the iconoclast, has declined vaccination, preferring to roll the dice.

After my phone call with the velvet-voiced Dr. Karan, I decided to do the world a big fat favor and just stay at home, not even attempting the shortest of errands, until I stop hacking and wheezing. I can renew the library books by telephone. And the freezer is so full that I’ve almost broken a foot a couple of times when packages of frozen whatever have tumbled out of a poorly-packed door.

I won’t get bored in my isolation. There’s that massive pumpkin I never got around to carving for Halloween. Cutting that thing up ought to occupy me for a morning. Then I can spend the rest of the afternoon researching pumpkin recipes. We can have pumpkin for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, for New Year’s, for Valentine’s Day and even on St. Patrick’s Day.

I’ve been sick with the flu since Wednesday night, when I felt a bug slam into my chest like something out of “Alien.” For the last four days, I’ve risen out of my bed mainly to hand out Halloween candy — with sanitized hands at a protected distance — and to continue to photograph the ratty degeneration of my appearance as I pad around the house in ancient pajamas.

Being ill allows you to obsess on small outrages, because you don’t have the energy or money to remedy the big ones (a crumbling roof or current medical insurance deductible). About all you’re really capable of doing is lying flat on your back while watching a movie and becoming increasingly and irrationally irritated over the fact that an actress is playing exactly the same character in your newest Netflix flick rental as she did in the completely different film in which you last saw her (Kelly MacDonald in “The Merry Gentleman” and “The Girl in the Cafe”).

I’m too tired to write her agent, but Kelly really needs to start challenging herself more in her roles; even the hats in both movies are the same. And Bill Nighy and Michael Keaton are playing almost identical repressed, older male love interests opposite her in the two films.

Today, after I stopped fuming over the characters in two movies that almost no on has seen, I staggered downstairs to ponder the state of my record albums, about which I keep saying I am going to copy and transfer over to CDs or my iPod. I had to pack a couple of hundred of these suckers up up when I was painting several rooms of my house this summer. As I boxed and cataloged them, I realized that there were several albums missing.

Only one of the vanished really bothered me, because I can probably live the rest of my life without listening to the third album of “The Association” or the waste of vinyl released by one-hit wonder, Johnny Nash (“I Can See Clearly Now”).

But what is gnawing away at me is the loss of “Hot Rats,” by Frank Zappa, a post-Mothers of Invention work that was the only record I ever purchased solely for the album’s cover design. I am infinitely more galled about Frank’s disappearance than I am about Kelly MacDonald’s acting career choices, because the album was in flawless condition. This is due to the fact that I only once tried to listen to Zappa’s weird instrumental foray into jazz, and just planned to eventually frame the endearing psychedelic pink 60s-era photograph of him crawling out of a crypt.

Now I suppose I’ll have to go crawling myself, only this time over eBay, to look for an equally pristine version of the album that has inexplicably vanished. That is, unless I forget all about it in an hour or so, and begin obsessing on some other aggravating bit of minutiae that briefly grabs my attention in between swigs of cough syrup.

Near the end of tonight, I was almost dropping fistfuls of candy in the bags of what few trick-or-treaters showed up at our house, because the evening was pretty much of a loss for me and my big witch hat.

Despite the low turnout, one of our dogs was in heaven. This old animal can never get enough attention, particularly from squealing young girls. Fortunately, those were our primary visitors tonight, and they arrived in a fairly tight time clump, so the aged beast could just wait patiently at the open door for the next group of shrieking and head-scratching arrivals, instead of constantly having to creak down a set of stairs from the living room to the foyer.

When I first moved to this house, the neighborhood annually went through a Halloween assault by doorbell-ringing candy lovers, but over the years, the action has shifted to La Subida Drive, a well-traveled thoroughfare about two blocks away. It’s 9 pm here, and my husband, who just arrived home from work, says that right now La Subida looks like Sunset Boulevard in 1969.

But it’s all quiet on the western front here, and the evening has been so mellow that, for a while, I was reduced to taking photos of myself in my hat.

Because my husband anticipated another low turnout this year, I was firmly instructed to buy bags of candy that he liked to eat, as opposed to what I will consume (my teenager will eat Leftover Anything with Sugar). I received these orders several days ago because my husband is still bitter about the jawbreaker-sized Lemonheads that I spontaneously purchased in gross two years ago. This year, he wanted less creativity with the Halloween candy and more chocolate.

So he’s got it now.

The Dress Tents of artists Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao encompass three of my favorite visual entertainments: photography, architecture, and fashion. The last is a more recent interest, and is completely due to several years worth of attention to detail while engrossed in emotionally-charged “Project Runway” episodes. Before that, my knowledge of haute couture extended only as far as the Yves St. Laurent beach towel I bought on sale at a Dallas department store more than three decades ago, and a Coach leather purse destroyed one night by a teething canine.

But no fashion knowledge is required to appreciate the compilation of images that make up “Dress Tents: Nomadic Wearable Architecture.” The artist statement on Lasser’s website explains what drove the women to create the clothing series and accompanying photographs: “each dress tent, which literally morphs from a dress into a tent, poses the question of what lies under a woman’s skirt in the 21st century.”

This is done with the Lasser and Pao’s tongues firmly placed inside their cheeks. It’s tough to pick a favorite, but I’d probably have to go with “Ms. Homeland Security: Ilegal Entry Dress Tent,” which portrays a woman on the border between Mexico and California surveying the landscape through binoculars, while wearing an enormous halter-necked dress tent of camouflage.

Equally appealing is the “Picnic Dress Tent,” a spoof on the post-World War II view of the role of the American woman.