Today, my family and I were going to spend the Halloween weekend outside of the city with friends' at their cottage.
Well, around 2:00am last night, I came down with flue symptoms, which did not let up until about 2:00pm today. So my wife and kids left for the cottage around 1pm, leaving me to recover at home. I steadily improved throughout the afternoon and realized that I now had a huge chunk of time to get on with my new layout.
I'd been saying to myself earlier, that I needed a large chunk of uninterrupted time to make a dent with the changes I'm planning. I've posted elsewhere on this forum about how I've finally decided on a location to model -- Wellow in Somerset, England.
I made good progress today but so much of this took a lot of time. I've probably worked 6 or 7 hours, kit-bashing my current station to (sort of) look like Wellow's, painting the station platforms to a light grey/white colour, painting parts of the station, and I was even able to finally add the decals to one of my tank engines that I'd repainted/renumbered (the latter took well over an hour). As I make more progress, I'll post pix.
At any rate, I'm pleased with my progress. As a father of two active young boys & with both my wife & I now working, I don't get the chance very often to model for 7 hours straight. Can anyone else relate to this?
Rob
I absolutely can relate. My employer encourages a schedule whereby employees work 9 hours per day in exchange for having a weekday off every other week. If I was an employer, i would adopt a similar schedule because having a weekday off allows employees an opportunity to take care of personal business during the week when certain places are open rather than using a personal or sick day or taking a long lunch. I often wind up using my extra day off for doctors appointments, taking care of auto repairs, visits to the DMV or government offices, and etcetera. The rest of the day becomes an excellent opportunity to relax and attend to hobbies, as weekends often become cluttered with family or other obligations. For some reason, I seem to accomplish more on that extra weekday off every other week.
The flu is another story. I haven't had the flu or even so much as a cold in many years. It's been so long that I can't remember how miserable it was. But I do remember being ill as a child, and I sometimes think being ill is a mother nature's way of letting us slow down and regroup for a few days. I recall many times feeling lousy and sleeping through an entire day, but the next two days were great for taking it easy, reading a book, and regaining strength. If you have some modeling you can take care of when you are quarantined in your house, that's even better. The number one thing the rest of us don't want you to do when you are contagious is to go out and public and spread it to the rest of us!
Glad to hear you are feeling better and your day wasn't a complete waste!
nachoman Wrote:I absolutely can relate. My employer encourages a schedule whereby employees work 9 hours per day in exchange for having a weekday off every other week. If I was an employer, i would adopt a similar schedule because having a weekday off allows employees an opportunity to take care of personal business during the week when certain places are open rather than using a personal or sick day or taking a long lunch. I often wind up using my extra day off for doctors appointments, taking care of auto repairs, visits to the DMV or government offices, and etcetera. The rest of the day becomes an excellent opportunity to relax and attend to hobbies, as weekends often become cluttered with family or other obligations. For some reason, I seem to accomplish more on that extra weekday off every other week.
The flu is another story. I haven't had the flu or even so much as a cold in many years. It's been so long that I can't remember how miserable it was. But I do remember being ill as a child, and I sometimes think being ill is a mother nature's way of letting us slow down and regroup for a few days. I recall many times feeling lousy and sleeping through an entire day, but the next two days were great for taking it easy, reading a book, and regaining strength. If you have some modeling you can take care of when you are quarantined in your house, that's even better. The number one thing the rest of us don't want you to do when you are contagious is to go out and public and spread it to the rest of us!
Glad to hear you are feeling better and your day wasn't a complete waste!
Thanks, Kevin. I agree with all of these things, especially that colds/flu's are mother nature's way of telling us to get some rest and slow down.
I also agree about the work/time balance, and how hard it is to fit all the doctor's appointments and car repairs in. I've been doing that this past week -- just spent almost $1700 on repairing my Honda!
Starting next year, I will end up having more free time. This summer, at work, we ran into a very dry economical spell. Rather than laying off full-time staff, they offered us 1 or 2 weeks more vacation time in exchange of a pay cut. I wasn't too keen on this at first but I now see that it should be a huge benefit. For example, if my wife is working in the week (she works part-time), I could take 1-3 days off to look after the kids, or get car repairs done, do jobs around the house, or just have extra personal time.
Starting next year, I will have 6 weeks of holidays! I feel like I'm living in the UK or Germany where 4 to 6 weeks holiday is common.
Cheers, Rob
You almost certainly didn't/don't have the flu. You more likely had a touch of food poisoning for it to have abated as quickly as it did.
-Crandell
I can relate to the pleasure of having an entire day to model. Even though I don't have kids it seems that life is busy and I only mange to squeeze in the occasional hour or two once in a while on the layout. I've occasionally been in the enviable position of having "too much vacation time", that is I reach the maximum number of hours one can carry over to the next year. When i approach that number I take a day or to of and have devoted them to improving the layout. Its very nice to have all of that unencumbered time!
Ralph
Selector Wrote:You almost certainly didn't/don't have the flu. You more likely had a touch of food poisoning for it to have abated as quickly as it did.
-Crandell
Yes, it's hard to say what it was. No one else in our family had been ill like this. It was 12-13 hours of off & on nausea, cold sweats, being hot, vomiting, etc. The good thing is that it's over (and that I made some layout progress
).
Rob
Ralph Wrote:I can relate to the pleasure of having an entire day to model. Even though I don't have kids it seems that life is busy and I only mange to squeeze in the occasional hour or two once in a while on the layout. I've occasionally been in the enviable position of having "too much vacation time", that is I reach the maximum number of hours one can carry over to the next year. When i approach that number I take a day or to of and have devoted them to improving the layout. Its very nice to have all of that unencumbered time!
Ralph
Yes, it's great when it happens. What amazes me is that I'm just working on a small 3x5 HO/00 layout and it has already taken me such a large amount of time to make progress on it. Where do the folks who have large basement empires find the time to finish their layouts? And I see so many finely detailed 6x10 and larger layouts in MRR magazines -- it must take these folks years & decades to finish them.
Another example: I probably will have spent 6 hours alone on kit-bashing/modifying my station, yesterday and today. If I were to do that during evenings after the kids are in bed, it would have taken me a least a week. But I guess that's half the fun -- taking your time to either modify or create layout buildings from scratch. Sometimes I want to rush through doing the scenery and buildings so I can get back to running trains!
Rob
I was off sick all of last week with "walking pneumonia". I didn't really feel like doing much for most of the week except taking my meds every evening, and two types of cough syrup as prescribed by my doctor. The worst thing about it was the fatigue and the difficulty breathing. I could barely look at the layout, and stand there and get tired thinking about all the work I need to get caught up on.
All that "free time" and not an iota went into the layout, however ya gotta take care of yourself. Besides, any work I tried to accomplish would have been half fast and possibly a major league screw up so its best I stayed away from it.
That said, since last night and late Saturday I've been starting to feel like my old self again. Finally got rolling on some more trackwork for the layout so things are looking up again.
tetters Wrote:I was off sick all of last week with "walking pneumonia". I didn't really feel like doing much for most of the week except taking my meds every evening, and two types of cough syrup as prescribed by my doctor. The worst thing about it was the fatigue and the difficulty breathing. I could barely look at the layout, and stand there and get tired thinking about all the work I need to get caught up on.
All that "free time" and not an iota went into the layout, however ya gotta take care of yourself. Besides, any work I tried to accomplish would have been half fast and possibly a major league screw up so its best I stayed away from it.
That said, since last night and late Saturday I've been starting to feel like my old self again. Finally got rolling on some more trackwork for the layout so things are looking up again.
Sorry to hear that you had such a long stretch of sickness but glad to hear you're on the mend now, and even getting back to the layout. I know my illness was on a smaller scale, but when I was at my worst I couldn't focus on anything either -- I couldn't even watch TV. It's great to be on the mend and to suddenly be making good progress.
Rob