A beautiful day

The sun is shining brilliantly and making the golden leaves of the oak trees and poplars glow maddly as the breeze makes them dance.

I did not sleep well last night. Every time I moved (or my husband moved) I felt sick because the issue with my ear and vertigo has returned. It made for a long night. I finally got up at 5:30 a.m.

I ate some saltines to try to settle my stomach and took a Zyrtec and some belladonna. I thought to myself that I should take a sick day.

Usually I don't take sick days. Usually what I try to do is push myself on through a day. Ultimately I end up accomplishing next to nothing and only feeling frustrated when I do that. But I do it anyway because I have some weird work ethic that says I should not ever take time to just BE.

I have a friend with this same weird work ethic. We were supposed to have lunch today but she cancelled because she was afraid to leave her office unattended for an hour in order to eat. (I am afraid I was a little snippy with her and I never even got to tell her I wasn't feeling well because apparently someone came in and interrupted our conversation and she hung up. Yikes. Let me bang my head against my desk here for a moment . . . )

I find this kind of work-at-all-costs thing unacceptable, but then I do it myself. I suppose that is why I find it so frustrating when other people don't take care of themselves either.

Unfortunately this way of dealing with my health sometimes ends up with me working and working until I collapse with some kind of major illness that leaves me bedridden for days.

So I thought I'd take a sick day. First, though, I had to come in here and check my e-mail. There was something in my husband's e-mail that he needed to take care of, so I took care of that for him at his instruction. He left for the firehouse at his usual 6:30 a.m.

As the house grew quiet, I thought, I really need to find some paperwork pertaining to the rental property. This kind of search is always a chore. That's because my filing system is nonexistent. I know what room of the house the stuff is in, and that's about it. I started trying to clean the filing cabinets out back in September, got so far, then abandoned the chore. I am not a very good secretary for myself (though I was a whiz for others when I used to do that sort of thing).

Anyway, I carried a chair into the spare room and sat before the filing cabinets. There were four years of income tax files sitting in the floor, haphazardly. I do not keep this room up very well but I never claimed to be a great housekeeper.

I thought I should just start looking and rearranging as I went.

Two and a half hours and one load of laundry washed later, I realized it was 9:30 a.m. I was still in my robe and house slippers. I had not eaten breakfast. I had cleared out an entire filing cabinet and put away three boxes of files. I had also found what I needed.

This, I thought to myself, is my sick day. I clean out the filing cabinets instead of going back to bed.

What a maroon. Isn't that what Bugs Bunny would say?

And now it's just 11:30 a.m., and I'm all dressed for a lunch date that isn't going to happen, and there is of course always work to do when you're a writer . . .