Saturday, I had a bit of a scratchy throat. Nothing too terrible, mind. Just sort of a “huh… I’m noting that when I’m eating this lime popsicle, there is a bit of a sting when I swallow”. Come Saturday night, I had a bit of a cough. Come 3AM, I woke up with a cough cough cough (deep breath all the way) *COUGH* *COUGH* *COUGH* *COUGH* *COUGH* until I was dizzy and seeing spots.
Maribou asked “holy cow are you alright?” and I stumbled out of bed and said “I’m going downstairs to take a covid test.”
Swabs up the nose, twirl it around for 1-onethousand through 15-onethousand, do it to the other nostril, dip it into the liquid and spin and stir for 1-onethousand through 15-onethousand, pinch and pull it out, three drops… 15 minutes. Nope, tested negative.
Went back to bed. It was worse the next day. Tested again. Still negative.
Come Monday, crud. I called in sick. Still testing negative, but it was awful. I had stuff I needed to do. There’s a server I need to rebuild! There’s a procedure I need to capture! There’s a document I need to write! Nope, not with this thing.
Tuesday was even worse. Here’s how bad it was: I wasn’t hungry. Tested negative. Just ate a couple of popsicles, had some berries, took some naps.
You know the thing where you take a nice, hot, steamy shower when you’re sick? Specially to get all that vapor in your lungs? Well, that was, as they say, productive. I felt like my uvula had a pair of fuzzy dice dangling from them. The water vapor helped me reach a point where I said “no dice”. (Huh. You’d think that scene from Police Squad would be on the web…)
Wednesday tested negative again but the good news was that I was *RAVENOUS*. Got in the car, did the drive-through (masked), ate like a horse.
Thursday, still testing negative but still coughing. But I’m pretty sure that I’ll be right as rain come Friday night.
Which makes me feel guilty. I mean, I had stuff I needed to do. There’s a server I need to rebuild. There’s a procedure I need to capture. There’s a document I need to write. I felt like I was malingering.
But this is one of those things where I hadn’t really used any vacation days since Iceland. It was always too busy, there was always something breaking, they were sending in servers from other labs, there were people who needed admin support, there was the guy who asked you to come in on the day you were going to take off because that’s the day that everybody else was going to take the day off and then we could finally get some work done…
And if you don’t use your vacation days, you’re going to use your sick days. This is one of those things that I yell at other people but never take to heart and do it myself. Well… for want of a couple of three day weekends, a week was lost.
SO USE YOUR VACATION DAYS, PEOPLE.
And I suppose I’d feel guiltier for missing a week of work if we weren’t in a pandemic for the last two years. Seriously, if your risk budget doesn’t account for people being out for a week at this point, you’ve done this to yourself.
Like I did this to myself by not using vacation days in the first place.
Anyway, this weekend will be spent *NOT* being sick (knock wood) and preparing for the Week From Hell when I get back. Luckily, the laundry ain’t gonna be too bad. Mostly pajamas.
So… what’s on your docket?
Did you know that one of the biggest liabilities for most large companies is the value of accrued–but unused–vacation days? This is why IT MATTERS if your employer gives you Vacation and Sick Days which are separate, or 1 basket of PTO for both of them. PTO doesn’t have to be paid out if the company closes or lets you go. Vacation does.
I am going to swim in a waterfall this weekend. I’m looking forward to it.Report
One of my buddies works at a Major Company that switched from the whole vacation/sick days paradigm to “UNLIMITED TIME OFF”… right around December 2019.
After going through a bumpy ride with covid, he’s saying that now it’s clear that “unlimited” means “two weeks for people who have worked there 4 years or less, three if you’ve worked there 5 or more”.Report
Yep…”Unlimited” because “there is no official policy and therefore we don’t have to accrue them on our balance sheet” but “we are going to shame and ostracize any employee who takes more than 3 weeks off and no one can take more than a week at a time.”Report
Luckily, our home state is one of the states where your employer is required to pay you for unused PTO.Report
My final paycheck when I was let go from the giant cable/telecom company post-acquisition was interesting. Untaken time-off was one of several things I got paid for. The most amusing was the second half of the (quite large) retention bonus I had been given a few months earlier.Report
I have been trying to attend a local board game meetup over the past several weeks. The first time it was cancelled because the organizer couldn’t make it. Two weeks ago, my wife had come down with strep throat, and I didn’t want to risk passing it around to everybody else. I have RSVPed for tomorrow, so hopefully it will work out this time.
I also need to make a trip to the hardware store to get the last few things I need for next weekend, when we are going to replace the carpet in our bedroom with laminate. We decided to save it for Labor Day weekend to have an extra day if things go badly, but hopefully we can get it done in one.Report
Good luck. I remember jokes about wallpapering and how you should never hang wallpaper with your spouse and whatnot.
I home laminate is easier.Report
I have long claimed there are two things you could do together with your spouse to test the strength of your commitment. One was balancing the checkbook, a task that has largely disappeared. (Does anyone still balance their checkbook?) The other was hang wallpaper. My wife and I hung wallpaper together in parts of our first house. I’m not sure if it’s indicative, but none of the houses since then have had any wallpaper.Report
I think that wallpaper has gone away entirely. We don’t have any in our house now. I want to say that I haven’t lived in a house that had it since the early 80’s.
It was a last gasp of Victorian sensibility and the Boomers said “you know what? We don’t need to do that a second time.”Report
I dunno. Right now I am tired after a very long week (dealing with a demanding former student, dealing with some first-week snafus, and yesterday, getting locked-down 10 minutes before I was planning to leave campus because there was a “distraught man with a gun” roaming around outside my campus building, and it took them a good hour to find and persuade him to go into custody).
I don’t have anything I HAVE to do. I’m still broke, but I’m gonna wait and see if I FEEL LIKE doing anything that wouldn’t cost too much money….it’s probably still too warm here for hiking to be very fun and I’m getting over some kind of (probably stress generated) stomach thing anyway. I could always start clearing out the books in my sewing room with my halfway plan of painting it over labor day weekend.Report
Take care of yourself. (Paint it next year, maybe.)Report
Related to painting and use of vacation, one summer I used all of my surplus vacation painting the inside of the house. One four day weekend per room: move all the furniture to the center of the room on Friday and cover it (mattresses went into the hall), cut all the edges on Saturday, roll the flat parts on Sunday, put the furniture back on Monday.
The strangest part was at the end of the summer and adjusting to work weeks longer than three days.Report
I had the same thing, Jaybird, a couple of months ago. Thought it was the plague, but 2 properly spaced tests said no. It kicked my butt for a couple days, and left a cough that lingered for a few weeks. I guess you can get sick from something else! Thank God for work from home.
First football officiating gig in season 32 is tonight. An unexpected wake tomorrow, more football, and dinner with friends will round out the weekend.
I really should do some housecleaning!Report
Too many unexpected wakes.
OH YEAH IT’S FOOTBALL SEASON. Kinda.
Wait, how are the Donkeys doing? Beat the Cowboys, lost to the Bills (?!?), and tomorrow is the Vikings.
Then I guess we’re the first MNF game? Huh. Cool.Report
Only a few of the starters have played more than a few snaps for the Broncos this preseason. No one has any idea how it’s going to go. Do they have enough talent to put around Russell Wilson? Can Wilson and the offensive coordinator get along? Wilson apparently prefers to treat the called play as aspirational to be tweaked on the fly, the coordinator is much less flexible that way. Rumor when the Broncos won their last Super Bowl was that Kubiak told the offensive coordinator to keep in mind he was Peyton Manning’s assistant, not the other way round.Report
Now that I live in Fort Collins, some talk about the CSU Rams is inevitable. It appears that the new coach’s goal this year is to play well enough to position the team for promotion to either the Pac-12 or the Big-12. I maintain my stance that the Rams and the CU Buffs down the road in Boulder would both be much happier in a somewhat football-diminished Pac-12 than anywhere else.Report
After losing Tebow, we have to rebuild for a while. Would that it were not so.Report
Bet you’re longing for Kyle Orton!Report
That Brock Osweiler fellow had potential, I tell you what.Report
Oh, my gosh. Say what you will, he’s set for life.Report