Sick leave

Stayed home sick today with some sort of flu bug thing. I don't get sick often and in the old days I would have toughed it out and gone to work anyway. I only got five days sick leave per year when I worked with Transcontinental. Actually, I remembered when the company first took over the newspaper and one of their HR people came into explain the wonders of working for the company. When I asked if we were allowed to roll over sick leave from one year to the next I swear the woman looked at me like I was an idiot. And since most of my co-workers laughed at me as well, perhaps she was right.

The thing is, I worked when I was sick, which had two consequences. The first was that I spread around whatever I had. For that matter, since most of my co-workers did the same thing, odds are I got it from them in the first place. And secondly, when you're sick your supposed to take it easy and give your body a chance to get better. Which I never did. That meant when I caught something, it stuck around. I think I was sick for the whole month of February and part of March back in '05. Never took a day off to get better.

I was always afraid to take those five sick days because you never know when something really bad might happen and you would get serious ill. Then you might need those five days and they were gone.

My current employer, however, allows me to roll over sick days, which I think is a much more sensible approach. So if I feel like crap, I don't go to work to try and tough it out, keep myself sick longer and infect everyone around me. I don't know how many I have, but this one (and maybe two, depends on how I feel in the morning) won't break me.

About the most stressful thing I did today was write my book. I'm now at 105,000 words. I'm a couple of days shy of two months at it. All of which sounds fine, except I've just gone back and reread what I wrote today. It is possible that perhaps writing when my brain is, how shall we phrase it, trying to escape from my skull was not my wisest move. Especially since I'm now at a crucial section of the book.

That means I have to go back and rewrite it. Because even by the quick and dirty standards I've set for myself, this is a little too ramshackle to let slide.

The good news is I think the end is possibly in sight. Certainly no more than another 50,000 words, probably less. With luck I'll be done with the first draft by the end of November, which is pretty much on schedule.

Then I shall only have curling to bore you all with.