Sick Paul Day

Got to the GEAS Writers' Group with plenty of time to spare on Sunday. I hadn't been able to finish the informal writing assignment set two weeks ago, but I did get about 1900 words written. That only really introduced two main characters and some setting. It did use four of the six cards that I had been drawn to use as the basis of the story. I did miss the point of the exercise, which was to use the cars as a framework to fix the story on, rather than, as I used it, as a simple inspiration to writing something.

For the first game I was stuck in a seat in direct sunlight behind a pane of glass for nearly four hours. I was not surprisingly very sleepy for the rest of the day. This unfortunately meant that I was fighting to stay awake for Katie's game in the evening, through no fault of hers. I did manage to watch the last two episodes of Band of Brothers when I got home. The penultimate episode, 'Why We Fight', is still one of the most striking pieces of TV I ever seen.

Got the Finance system back up and working by lunch time, as I had planned in the email I had sent to my boss on Saturday night. Despite being on the new server it is taking an age for the login screen to appear. Once they get past that it's fine, but it is annoying when the users have to leave the program for about ten minutes waiting for the login screen to appear.

I nearly took the afternoon off as a combination of my throat and a sudden new stabbing pain in my gut made it difficult to focus. I think I must have eaten something unpleasant on Monday morning, but I can't think what it was that would be the problem. So I went home at lunch time, thinking that I would take the afternoon off, but ended up going back in and then on to Pizza Hut. However, the pain kept coming and going, so I ended up only eating a quarter of my pizza before asking for it to be boxed so I could take it home. They others ended up going to James' for the game while I went home to hover near my toilet expectantly.

Today I woke early, despite my best efforts, with my throat completely seized up. I couldn't even speak in a sibilant whisper. That cleared up by the time the office was open and I could speak almost normally to call in sick. So far I've spent the morning watching Moulin Rouge for the first time from my NetFlix subscription.

This afternoon and evening I'm going to go some various creative things.

• Write a post for Cossmass
• Write a scene for Last One
• Write a scene for the Borneo StarTower
• Research for Secret Project #1
• Install Gentoo on my "Media Centre" PC