Under the weather

For a few weeks now, I've been waking in the morning with a slightly heavy chest, as if a cold were coming on. A few weeks... the same thing. Over the long weekend just gone it got a little worse and moved its way up into my sinuses and I was a bit blocked up for a day or two. Yesterday, I had a headache that felt like a small rodent was knawing away at the inside of my eye socket. It was strange to look in the mirror and see that I was normal, such was the feeling of there being a large depression just to the right of my nose. I've kind of been wanting this lurgy to take over and just make me sick already, that way I could stay home from work, catch up on a lot of sleep, drink warm beverages and flat lemonade and eat lots of chicken or chilli soup (really clears out the sinuses if you can handle the heat). But all I've had is this pathetic one-symptom-at-a-time kind of flu. Just little things that are annoying but not the kind of thing I need to take a day off to get over. And oh, how I want to take a day off, feel a bit sorry for myself and do some quality pottering around the house. I have some old albums I want to convert to CD; there's more photo galleries I'd like to put up here at some stage; then there's my humorous Tshirt designs I've been meaning to get back to. The only way I'll ever have time for these things is by staying home being sick. I think we should be able to take our sick days on a pro-rata basis depending on how sick we are. For instance, if I feel not-quite-right for two weeks (ten working days), or if I'm only 90% healthy, I should be able to take a day off. That's fair isn't it? Sure, I'd have to work out the scale properly because being 0% well probably equates to death. Maybe you get a whole day for being less than 50% well or something. And don't ask me how you put a value on how well/unwell you are; these are merely details. So I'm thinking of taking tomorrow off but I won't for the following reasons.

• I'm not sick enough
• I have too much work to do and deadlines approaching
• Work is putting on lunch

Yes. Contrary to what you might have been told, there is such a thing