Orange is a good colour

The week has not been a grand one so far. I woke up yesterday morning feeling like grandma once again. A gift of our mock-grading the previous day, along with the two orange stripes to add to my belt, signifying I'm now a very unofficial orange belt.

I needed to get into the office post-haste which meant joining the rush hour traffic I usually manage to avoid. Having left a full half hour early I made it in a whole fifteen minutes early to hand Darnell the proofs that I'd spent three hours of my Sunday night organising and checking.

Liz, the oft-mentioned DTP operator, had managed to get a stomach bug on top of all the other illnesses that have plagued her for the last few nightmarish weeks of work-load hell. No-one realised this, bar presumably her, and despite it being her birthday on Saturday her children didn't come to visit her. This meant that the first time anyone knew anything was when my bosses panicked at her uncharacteristic lack of communication and the fact that she hadn't come into the office to fetch the work she'd said she would.

They tried every means of contacting her, phone, family and friends to no avail and eventually tracked down her home address and went round. With no response at the door, but her car in the garage, they called emergency services and broke into her house to find her so ill that she'd been unconscious for a substantial while and she was rushed to the nearest ICU where she remains, last I heard, conscious but too dehydrated and weakened to leave.

This meant the ball has dropped somewhat, our reports are delayed and freelancers have been called in a last ditch attempt to plug the leaking dyke - however much of the pressure has also been landed squarely on my shoulders. Having come down with an ill-timed and total unforeshadowed cold on Saturday morning I have not been in the best of moods or states to face the trails of the last few days. Especially as my beloved Orange Avenger that is Cal-C-Vita hasn't been able to do much more than mitigate my cold to the sorry snuffling stage of things.

Hence I can't believe it's only Tuesday!

A short-yet-sweet comment from a long lost friend and my belated discovery that the CLAWsWiki is back up, prompting a dip into my old blog archives has added an air of sureality to this fledgling week only held in check by the fact that I've not been adding painkillers to my sinus meds.

All I can say is: Can I have back whatever I was on when I wrote those early blogs, 'cause it looks like it must have been the good stuff?