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In the 'two countries divided by a common language' dep't, I learn from myriad entries on FFLs (and my own) that Americans 'call out' when they're not going to make it to work. Canadians 'call in'. Because it's the weekend I did neither, of course. Instead I stayed at home almost all of yesterday, as I'm supposed to, and felt vile, as I do when I stay home-- weak, ear-achey, and inclined to burst into tears over things like my 1998 line-a-day daybook.

So today I took half an ativan because it's supposed to help virus-caused balance problems, though it may help by making you not *care* that you've got virus-caused balance problems, or care much about anything, in fact; got on my trusty iron horse and pedalled happily in mild sunshine (above freezing) over to Bloor and Brunswick. And bought books, which is exactly what I need, of course. But everything at BMV looked so fascinating, I was hard put to get away with a mere $40. Knowing that the attractiveness might be just the ativan speaking, I read a few pages of each OMG wonderful! find, and so passed up on Donald Richie's novel about the life of Atsumori's killer, Mr Darcy's Decision, the fictionalized account of the real-life Chinese Imperial princess who spied for the Japanese in WW2, and a book of essays by Natsume Soseki which read as floaty-ungraspable as Japanese theorizing always does read to me in English. I should try it in Japanese and see if it reads better there, but my guess is not. I've heard that the Japanese, like the French, prefer to wander about a point rather than actually come to it, an approach that makes me scream whenever the French do it.

So now I have two great big fat books, two eensy weensy skinny books, and one that's just right.

The fat guys are The Vision of Piers Plowman, Middle English text (yay for the sound of Middle English) with sidenote glosses (boo to the obscurity of Piers the Plowman), which is so much better than the prose translation that was also on offer. The other is, err, vol 2 of Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the Brewitt-Taylor translation, just because it reads more fun than the Moss Roberts one. I can probably do them in tandem, and get through the last two vols that way. (FWIW, they didn't have vol 1. And I know B-T is online but I can't read online. Ebooks are so not for me.)

The skinnifers are The Panther and the Lash by Langston Hughes--

I am the American heartbreak —
The rock on which Freedom
Stumped its toe—
The great mistake
That Jamestown made
Long ago.

and Thundering Silence By Thich Nhat Hanh.

And the Just Right is Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits-- Women in Korean Ritual Life, which should be fascinating whichever way one approaches it. Erm-- and if I approach it with half an eye on dragons, well, so what?

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First encountered here (http://joasakura.livejournal.com/321784.html) and then in various snowbound people's ljs. Regionalism maybe?

Really? I'm US and have only ever heard "call in".

Ditto the above.

Then I suppose it must be a regionalism.

We with the British colonial past 'call in sick' or we might say in Singlish 'gotta take an MC' ... which is to say we have to get a medical certificate from a GP to verify that we really are sick! Although oft times I would have rather stayed in bed and just rest so that I didn't have to sit in a waiting room however long it takes for a doctor to see me and declare me unfit for work. Meh.

^__^ the chatty rooster might tell it funnier than I have explained.

Can't see the MC thing at all. If I'm too sick to drag me into work, I'm too sick to drag me to the doctor's. (Also my sicknesses usually involve the digestive tract, and the reason I don't go into work is that I daren't leave the house.)

Hope you feel better soonest.

Thanks. Antibiotics seem to be helping.