a speech that was hard to stomach

Yesterday I stayed home from work, feeling a little under the weather; my stomach and gut had been bothering me since the weekend, when I had attributed it to the rich food Jeff and I had been eating, and Monday when I ascribed it to the greasy Johnny Rockets burger and fries.

On Tuesday night, we decided we would watch the State of the Union farce speech, and it's probably no great surprise that it angered, distressed and even sickened me; I actually felt physically ill throughout the speech, and slept very poorly later that night, getting up several times to use the bathroom. So, even though I don't have much sick leave and probably could have functioned reasonably well at the office, I decided to burn a sick day anyway to rest and remain close to the toilet.

Today, when I returned to work, I discovered that several of my colleagues had been experiencing similar gastrointestinal symptoms over relatively the same period. My boss reported having felt sick over the weekend, and one of my employees had stayed home on Monday when both he and his son were experiencing the same thing. So maybe it wasn't the food--and maybe Bush only exacerbated the discomfort, rather than being solely responsible--but some sort of mild bug we were passing around.

Interestingly, Alex (the cat) has just been back to his litter box--which sits in a closet not far from the computer desk--three times in the last five minutes, so this bout of diarrhea doesn't even seem to be confined to the humans of my acquaintance.