Fed up with early Feb.

You know when you're just having one of those days...

This is the fourth or even fifth day of a really painful, persistent cough and I am about to lose it.

Stuff that would bother me a little is setting me off like crazy.

And it is everything today:

• The annoying guy from work manages to load more work onto me, even when I am working from home
• The insufferable bores from the one bulletin board I still belong to are so sure they are right, even dismissing people's personal experience
• Clicking on one too many shoddy click-bait articles over at Slate
• But mostly I'm just sick of being sick.

Now I have just enough perspective to not fire off an email I will later regret, or to flounce off the bulletin board, or who knows what else.  But it is hard keeping calm, in these stressful times, even when healthy.

I have found I am getting less and less out of the bulletin board scene, so I think I will temporarily block it from my browser, as well as Slate.  If I change my mind, I can always come back.  I did so once before, which was a lot more mature than giving up my account there.  I also have a lot of users there on ignore (and I think the place would function a lot better if more posters ignored those posters of a trollish persuasion).  When I do rejoin, I am definitely going to ignore one more user who is this weird control-freak, hall monitor type always going on about whether a CD release is legit in the E.U. under PD laws or not and then scolding Americans who happen to get their hands on an import.  I've totally had it with him.

I've heard that Firefox or Chrome have some feature where you can actually block people in comment threads, which sounds like something right up my alley, though to be honest, avoiding comment threads in the first place is an even better strategy.  I basically only read them on Slate, and, as I said, I've decided to take a break from Slate for a while as well.*

I am relieved that I was looking at the wrong calendar page, and I don't have a concert to go to tonight.  In retrospect, I think going out Sat. was probably a mistake, and I might well have been better today, even had I pushed off going until Monday.  But I don't have 20/20 foresight, and it was worth it to me at the time.

I will give maybe 50% at work today (and report the rest as sick time), and try to actually get a bit rested.  I have one concert to see next week, and I should have recovered by then.  I was sort of tempted to see Measure for Measure this Sat. (sadly no Sunday matinees), but I am not buying a ticket until I know for sure I have beaten this cough.  It's closing night, so it might sell out before I am certain, but then it just wasn't meant to be. 

* Oddly enough it is more straight-forward to block specific sites in the standard release of IE than in Firefox.  However, it looks like LeechBlock is close enough to what I want.  I'll give it a trial.