SICK DAY

I didn’t go to work today. The mild cold that started on Sunday has evolved into a full-blown illness. I have a cough now and my chest hurts somewhat. The cough is productive, which means I cough up a bit of nice phlegm as a reward. I woke up feeling tired and generally bleh, so I decided to stay home. In my younger days I might have dragged my ass out of bed, went to work, and just been miserable at my desk all day but I’m too old for that now.

I did however get some work done at home. In the early evening after taking a nap, I was feeling good enough to log into my work computer and get a very important task done. I’ll probably go to work tomorrow as I’m feeling marginally better now. At least the weekend is close.

BURGER KING FIRE

I was coming home from work this evening on the train. The tracks pass by a commercial area where there are restaurants and shops. I was surprised to see firetrucks and police in the parking lot. I was even more surprised to see firefighters on the roof of the Burger King.

If I had to guess, the Burger King restaurant caught fire somehow. If you watch the video in this tweet, you can see smoke billowing from the building. The police wound up closing the whole area. Even shops, stores, and restaurants that were separated from the Burger King were forced to close up, leaving a lot of diners in the middle of an unfinished dinner.

You’d think with all that smoke that it was a pretty serious fire but about two hours later, I actually saw the drive-thru back in business again.

POOP

On Sunday I was on my way to have dim sum with my parents. I was going to use public transportation so I was walking towards the train platform. Along the way, I noticed a brown stain on the concrete floor. At first I thought it was mud because it was thin. The weather was warm and sunny though and we weren’t near anything that had dirt. As I continued to walk, I saw more of these brown stains and then I realized it wasn’t dirt, it was poop.

The poop was very loose in consistency, very high on the Bristol chart if I had to give it a number. Did some poor soul have an emergency of some sort? Closer to the station gates, there was a much thicker layer of poop, with a shoe print clearly on it. Did the pooper step in their own loose poop? Or perhaps some unsuspecting person not look down in time?

The poop trail ended at the gates. It was difficult to tell which end of the poop trail was the start and which was the end. Did they poop leaving the train or on the way to the train? I guess if you really had to poop you wouldn’t be running to catch a train. Well, whatever happened I hope that person was able to salvage their dignity somehow. Pooping yourself is just terrible.

SUMMER COLD

I woke up this morning with a sore throat. It wasn’t too bad but I definitely knew something was amiss as soon as I woke up. I drank some water and ate some breakfast. The soreness subsided and I felt almost normal again. I detected a bit of fatigue, a slight dip in energy that signaled I wasn’t exactly healthy.

The rest of the day proceeded normally for me but during the early evening, I felt the slightest of sinus congestion. I probably have a cold. So far it’s pretty mild but we’ll see what tomorrow brings. It’s never great to get sick no matter what time of the year it is but it seems like an extra kick in the groin to get sick during the summer when the weather is nice. In the winter time, when the it’s cold and rainy, you were going to be inside anyways, sick or healthy. In the summer time, it’s great being outside to enjoy the weather. It sucks when you’re ill and have to stuck in bed.

I suppose I should feel lucky that it’s been about four or five months since I was last ill. I average about one cold during the summer so perhaps this was not unexpected. At least it’s not a sinus infection. I shudder to think about how terrible my entire month of January was.

Well, I’m going to get some rest now.

UNLIKELY

This afternoon I met with someone from Sun Life Financial at work for a bit of a financial analysis of my current situation. I hadn’t really done something like this before so it was a very interesting process.

The nice lady from Sun Life took all my relevant financial info from me, then asked me how much money I thought would be required per month in my retirement. I didn’t really know but she suggested that $2000 was a conservative amount. Using a program that she had on her laptop computer, she estimated that I could retire at age 57.

While I appreciated the analysis, I believe there’s very little chance I will be able to retire at age 57 with the amount of money she thought I could have. The analysis assumes that I’ll be working at EA until age 57 and that my salary will stay relatively the same. There’s no way I’ll be making games until I’m 57. This industry is for young people and while developers have started to skew towards being older, the percentage of people making games over the age of 50 is still really small. Also, even if I stayed in the industry until I was 57, very few people stay at one company for such a long time. I know someone who just left the company and he was at EA for seventeen years. His tenure is quite rare these days.

I believe the analysis did have merit however for some of my short-term financial goals and it also clarified where I need to put my money to maximize its potential. I’m not expecting to be retired before 60 but hopefully I can do my best to get there.

RAMEN DANGER

There’s a good chance I’ll be going out for lunch tomorrow and we’ll be going for ramen. My lunch companion is well aware of my dicey past history with ramen. He’s joking that I shouldn’t worry because the washrooms in that place are pretty nice.

You maybe wondering why would I even agree to go to a ramen place for a weekday lunch. That is indeed an excellent question. Based on the third person in our party, the ramen place might be the most convenience place to meet. This is a terrible idea. I hope it goes well.