Working, the 'flu and life in general

It's been a tough two weeks. I don't know how I managed it, but I worked for 9 days (with a weekend, in between) and had the 'flu for a large part of the second week. Living in a large city, travelling on an underground network where you can be standing next to a piss-stained tramp one minute and a celebrity the next (sometimes without much difference between the two), and smoking all add up to a cold.

Add to the mix: 13 hours per day, plus two hours travel; working at home following 15 hours of work/travel; builders in the house replacing the boiler and creating plaster dust be ripping out kitchen walls and it makes sense that my body said, "Enough's enough, I want to be ill."

Of course, I brought most of this on myself. I could have worked less, not taken on that second job for a large consumer electronics manufacturer promoting their handheld gaming, mp3 player and DVD-displaying device. Now I am suffering.

Monday, it's my 32nd birthday. It'll probably be spent in bed, coughing into a growing mound of snotty tissues and bemoaning the death that surely will end the suffering. Of course, later next week I'll be wondering what all the fuss was about. In fact, turning on the news has a similar effect.

Once things quieten down, I might actually get around to posting up a new story. Until then, you'll have to make yourself busy by reading the comments.

What do you mean, there aren't any?

purplesimon out...

What a start to 2005

There's a lot going on at the moment, around the world. It's really heartbreaking just reading about it, let alone what it must be like to be one of those people with missing loved ones or those that were caught up with it, saw parents and children, brothers and sisters die under the waves - right before their eyes.

It doesn't bear thinking about.

There are those people that believe that only positives can come from disasters. This might not be a vision shared by others, but in this case it rings true. The world has responded like no one could ever have predicted. The human spirit has broken down the barriers of race and religion: everyone has been affected. Each of us knows loss; it is a shared human emotion.

Personally, it has just been a busy week at work, with more to do today. I am not a fan of working at weekends, believing that the two days I get off to do something more leisurely; however, this weekend the house has plumbers in and they are setting about removing my heating boiler and replacing it with one that works. It's January, and in the UK this is not a warm time, so a boiler is something I really need. I thought that spending all this money on a heating system made me seem selfish in the face of the recent tsunami disaster, so I made a sizeable donation at my local tube station yesterday and I propose to do so each day next week, a minimum of £5 (as this is usually what is left in my pocket each morning).

I can do no more, I hope it is enough.

purplesimon out...