Taking a Sick Day

I never do this, but I called in sick this morning. Maybe you can help me feel like it is justified, because even though all I want to do is go back to bed (and I got my eight hours last night, even), I keep thinking I should have gone to work. I've been fighting a cold all week long, and wanting to take a sick day since Monday, actually. But I have gotten to work and functioned and only complained a little bit. I could have probably pressed on today too, but I'm feeling more and more run down, and I think it will only get worse until I put a halt to it, so I'm sitting here at the computer with my cup of echinacea tea, feeling guilty about not being at work, when technically I probably could, and wanting to just sleep all day.

You know what? When I was working swing and graveyard shifts, and a lot of stuff tended to concentrate itself mostly at one end of the week, I usually felt like I had to hold my breath and try not to drown in order to get through those few days. But then it wound down with a graveyard shift and I got to sleep all day and be perfectly justified. Now that I'm working days, I keep wondering when that day when I get to sleep all day will come around again. I'm not working as many hours, and I have more time to spend with my family and be social, but the only time to myself (and quiet time for school work) is at night after everyone goes to bed. When I was off during the day sometimes, there were a few activities I did with Ashley and with homeschool groups, but those things felt relaxed and they added to my energy. Now I'm not usually available for that stuff, but there are social events in the evening that I used to skip because I was at work. Sometimes I try to send Mark and the kids and say I have to study, which I do, but they are reluctant to go and do something fun and leave me alone at home. Why is it such a difficult concept for husbands that women fantasize about having time alone at home? I guess I can't speak for all of us, but I don't think that I am the only one who craves being in a quiet house just for a little while, to get things done or to relax, or both.

Please indulge me in one more rant before I either get busy on school stuff, like I should, or go lie down. I hate Spammers! It's not even just that it's a pain to delete hundreds and thousands of unwanted emails. The bigger problem is the real messages that I do want to get that are missed in the process of trying to keep the junk manageable. I use filters to keep the Spam out of my inbox, but the filters sometimes miss some of the Spam and zap the real stuff. Spammers design their mailings on purpose to get past filters and wreck havoc. I have never bought anything from a Spammer and I never will, so why won't they just leave me alone? If everyone would adopt that policy maybe they would go away. Another way they interfere with the kind of communication I want is here on my weblog. A main priority for me when I set up this website was to make it interactive. Because of abuse by spammers I have been forced to post my email address as rapATddiamondDOTnet, so it isn't clickable and you have to make substitutions in order to use it. They have forced me to change addresses. And I have data stored at my old address that will be lost when I delete that address, as I need to do because it keeps getting so much Spam it is filling up all the space on my server. I had to move my Tagboard to a back page, and even there it has been the spammers who find it and post. I even had to put my comments on moderated status because the spammers were there too and it's easier to moderate than to go back in and delete.

Spammers are not only electronic. My snail mail gets plenty of Spam too, and keeps us from seeing what real mail we have. Mark and I are each missing one or two checks (paychecks and travel reimbursement) and I am worried that the kids dropped them or threw them out when checking the mail and dealing with the Spam. This is a serious problem that does more damage than irritating people. Even more than personal damage, it kills so many trees unnecessarily. I don't know what we can do about it other than vent.

To any spammers who are here reading this: go away. This site is not here to be exploited by you. If you are not sure whether you are a spammer or not, you probably are not. If you are not here to flood my or anyone's inbox with unwanted messages, to redirect my readers to irrelevant sites, or to try to use my web space to sell something, then you are welcome here.

To my readers: I have some pictures on the camera of the white shawl (it's more than a third finished now) and of the fur babies, and I'll post them later on if I get some energy. Maybe even today. Please keep coming back, and don't let the spammers keep you from leaving a message, okay?