repressed librarian

Despite my strong desire not to abandon this blog when things get crazy, I’m finding that it’s still one of the first things to go. Something I have learned about my own blogging habits is that I need to post during the day, or early evening at the latest, because if I wait until the end of a long work day (as they nearly all are, and as it is right now), I find that either my tired brain is too exhausted to think of anything to write or I just give in to the exhaustion and go to bed feeling guilty for not writing. Just because I learned that lesson does not, however, mean that I am applying it, at least not with regularity. But it’s a goal, so I thought I would put it out there.

Last weekend was a bit of a turning point on the work front, ushering us into a new phase. PublisherWoman and I had a fairly intense day on Saturday, spending hours talking about big things, abandoning our carefully thought out plan for the day to be guided by what we both felt was more important. Our conversation was emotional, animated, and enlightening, and we were able to arrive at some decisions about how we should move forward to overcome some of the bigger challenges we face. One of the results is that instead of staying home this weekend, I’m flying to Portland (the one on the left) to spend a couple of days with a colleague, teaching her to do some of the work that I do, in order to free up some of my time for these new, exciting, and challenging things.

The decision for me to take this trip came about just yesterday, and I’m leaving on Friday, so I’ve been scrambling amidst the many already scheduled work tasks to make travel arrangements, do laundry, pack, run errands that I had planned for the weekend, and sundry things of that nature. I am also trying to prepare an outline and fill in as many details as possible of what we will work on together so that the trip is not wasted due to my lack of preparation. I’m excited and think it will be good, but it would have been nice to have just a little more time to prepare.

At the moment, my alarm is set to go off in just over four hours, and my face is covered in a green clay mask that needs my attention, so I think it’s time to move on.

I’ll have wireless broadband on this trip, so you’ll probably be hearing from me again soon, perhaps in the form of airport blogging.

• I’m still really behind on the day-to-day stuff after the recent crisis/panic/deadline time, but I’m breathing a little easier and slowly catching up.

• I took a break from my regularly scheduled programming today to go to nearby city for lunch at one of my favorite vegetarian restaurants with comebacknikki.
• I also finally got to meet ZaPaper, who was as lovely and smart and fun as I thought she would be.
• There were cupcakes and shoe shopping involved (although none of us actually purchased any of the latter).
• There were also freaky weird little puppets (ask comebacknikki–she thought they were entertaining!)
• I answered or filed nearly 50 email messages while I was on the train going to and from said city.
• That was all for work. Now I need to start on my backlog of personal email.
• I have a conference call at what many of you would call an insanely early hour tomorrow, followed by a long day of work, so I should have been in bed hours ago.
• That’s not a very exciting note to end on, but that’s all I got right now. Good night.

This is one of those days where, with my former blogging habits, I would not post at all, for a couple of reasons. First, because I’m just too swamped, and second, because I don’t like to whine or complain more than necessary. But if I’m going to post regularly, that means you will be exposed to more of the real, less-censored me, including some of my more frantic days.

So here I am, tired and a bit panicky about everything people need from me in the next couple of days. PublisherWoman leaves early Wednesday morning for a four-meeting sales trip. That requires many new reports and presentation materials to be created, designed, and printed. Tomorrow, I have an email campaign going out to 7,000 people, and I need to finish designing and testing it, as well as getting the lists ready. The magazine goes to press on Wednesday morning, a major time-consuming stressor in its own right. I normally spend 12 or more hours on Monday and again on Tuesday doing the final online proofing of the layout and ads. Those are just the big three. There are many more things, of course, and only about 36 hours left, during which I’m hoping for at least a tiny bit of sleep. Lest you think this situation is the result of procrastination, I assure you that is not the case. I have fallen back into my old habits of working long days 7 days a week recently, even during my mystery illness that significantly drained my energy.

For those of you who are inclined to worry about me (yes, I’m referring to you, LB!), I appreciate the sentiment, but there’s no need, really. It gets like this, and I manage; I just rarely blog about it. The end of the week will be back to my normal busy-but-manageable levels, and I will get to take a day off this weekend. In the next few weeks, I will also be making an effort and investing some time in identifying more things that can be delegated and taking steps to make that happen. Until then, I’m doing the best I can and trying not to hyperventilate.

ETA: I may have slept only two hours last night and hardly any over the weekend, but everything looks like it’s going to get done, just in time, and up to our usual high standards!

It took six full days, but my terrible headache finally went away. Now that I can think more clearly, I am certain it wasn’t a migraine at all, but that I was fighting some kind of virus. Other symptoms that I was taking in isolation, attributing to other causes, or not really thinking about at all (lack of energy=working too hard; swollen glands=allergies; chills=unseasonably cool weather; backache=must not have noticed when I did something to injure it; loss of appetite/nausea=happens a lot with my weak stomach; etc), when considered together, certainly point to a virus. Now that I’m feeling better, in the spirit of being a better blogger, I would like to spend some time crafting a wonderfully insightful and tremendously interesting post. But because I was moving slowly for several days and have only been able to work 10 or 12 hours a day rather than the 16 to 20 I usually work when we are on production deadline, I am quite behind. So, instead, I am going to put my tired self to bed, get a good night’s sleep in preparation for a marathon day, and promise to write more soon.

I have had an intense headache (possible migraine) for five days now. Each night, I have gone to bed confident that it will be gone when I awaken and that I will feel like my usual high-energy self. I’m losing my optimism; tonight, I kind of just want to cry.

This situation is not aided by the fact that this is the most demanding week of our eight-week production cycle, the week where I rarely sleep (even less than usual) and spend my long, long days proofreading and correcting every last, tiny detail of the magazine up until the hour it goes to press…

Have any of you read Dark Ages America? If so, what do you think of it? I have not read it yet, but an acquaintance of mine summarized the author as saying that the more technology we bring into our lives, the further removed we are from what makes us human, which, in turn, makes us angrier and less empathetic to other people. If someone said this to you, how would you respond?

Despite my previously mentioned extremely limited amount of disposable income these days, the universe has presented me with a couple of acquisition opportunities even I can afford, specifically in the form of shoes. I had no intention of purchasing any new shoes this summer, but, as I already shared with you, these were too cheap and fantastic to pass up.

Last week, a had one of those delightful JC Penney $10 off $10 purchase coupons, so I was able to obtain these funky strappy ballet flats for only $9!

In case you can’t tell from the photo, they are shiny purple. My favorite color! They are also surprisingly comfortable, but not so much as the Skechers.

I also happen to be in love with these shoes (don’t you just love them, comebacknikki?), but I could never pull off the actual wearing of them, thus greatly reducing temptation:

P.S. After being plagued by it for more than a year, I *finally* found the cause of my problem with posting photos. It was a stupid little line in my CSS file that I hadn’t realized was there. It’s all fixed now, so you can expect more photos, as I should be able to post them with ease.

It’s been a long time since I have posted in the venerable RBOC format. Since I’m overdue, here are some random bullets of what’s going on now, mostly work:

• I played hostess and chauffeur for a business meeting held at my house today. Since the company I work for is a home-based business, my dining room with its large table often gets used as our conference room.
• Around 6:30 pm, I sat down to read some of an important, newly released 143-page report on our industry, got a little too comfortable, and was awakened a few minutes later by the storm siren. There was a tornado warning for my town, so I got to spend some quality time with a flashlight in my kind of gross and scary basement. It was a wild storm, but I’m grateful that no tornado materialized.
• 500! That’s how many brochures I just finished printing, folding, labeling, wafer sealing, stamping, and mailing, personally inviting people to attend an event our company is hosting. It didn’t really sound like that many until I printed the 50 pages of address labels! At least they look really good (I *love* my color laser printer). My colleague was surprised to learn that they had not been professionally printed and machine-folded.
• Recommitting myself to blogging regularly as we are going into bi-monthly production of the magazine is proving to be difficult. I spend so many hours every day proofreading pages and making design changes (in addition to my regular work) that it really does leave me exhausted and with nothing but white static in the brain. It’s like I know the thoughts are there, I just can’t access them at the end of the day when I’m this tired. But I am challenging myself to pay more attention and record more details, and I think it will get easier with practice.