Long week
Or, not so much long as stressful. Spent a lot of time misunderstanding people and vice versa. Spent too much time sending stressed emails and then being really nervous about the responses to them. It's been the sort of week where everything anyone sends me in email reads to me like it's sarcastic and/or annoyed and/or upset with me. So I've been spending too much time playing interpretation games, trying to figure out what someone really meant by a particular phrase and trying to phrase things myself in ways that wouldn't be misinterpreted. (Had a chat on the phone a couple days ago with a friend who's going through that kind of interpretation-games thing with a sweetie. No fun.) Also spent too much time staying up late doing various obsessive things.
One nice thing about obsessive behavior is that it results in long-delayed projects getting done. The other night I channeled it into building a database to keep track of SH artists, something I'd been promising Mary Anne I'd do for months. Should save everyone involved a lot of time in the long run, but in the short run it meant I was up 'til 2:30 getting "just one more thing" done on it. I forget whether that was the night when, as I went to bed at 2:30 (as I've done too many nights this week), I noticed that I had a 10:00 meeting the next morning. Or maybe it was the night I went to bed around 3 and woke up, temporarily wide awake, at 8. Or the night I slept fitfully because I was fretting that something I'd written was inappropriate for the place where I posted it.
So. Plenty big fun, yes indeedy. On the upside, today I finally got plane tickets for the SWIL reunion coming up in three weeks, and they were cheaper than expected; also, in the process, I found my free-flight voucher that I got from United a couple months ago for agreeing to be bumped to a later flight. But I think I'll save it for sometime when a flight's gonna be really expensive otherwise. Maybe I'll try to make a visit to Boston in—um, I was going to say "in January" and then remembered that that's a lousy time to go to Boston. Maybe in the spring.
Maybe I'll have some vacation days saved up again by then. I'm not all out of them at the moment, but that's only because work neglected to deduct the four days I took off for the New Jersey/New York trip. It would be nice to get those free, but I just know that if I don't point out the mistake, they'll figure it out themselves in a couple of months and spring it on me by surprise.
Of course, it's easier said than done: it turns out that my company is the first company I've ever encountered where the HR people prefer using email to using the telephone. (Oddly, the engineers here mostly prefer in-person conversation to email. Weird.) I hate writing to an address like "hr@mycompany.com"; no telling whether that goes to one contact person, five contact people, or all the HR people in the company. To make matters worse, it turns out that who I need to contact is the Payroll department—but our intranet site has no information at all about Payroll, other than a single email address. I sent email there on Wednesday but have heard nothing. I got someone in HR to give me a Payroll telephone number, and called them today and left a message, but have heard nothing. Wacky.
Meanwhile, tomorrow night I'm co-GMing a LARP. That's a Live-Action RolePlaying game; the main GM has played in this particular scenario before, but has never run a game (but he's doing an impressive job of preparing for it); I've been GMing tabletop RPGs for, oh, twenty years or so (minus the last two and a half years, during which time I haven't done any RPGing at all), and have played in and run/written a couple of murder-mystery-party games, but LARP is a different kettle of beast altogether. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about but who read sf, think Dream Park but without the high-tech and with the GMs right there in the middle of things. And a less realistic combat system.
So I've been preparing for that; fortunately the prep in this case consists largely of familiarizing myself with the characters and the scenario, rather than having to do much creative work. It's not nearly as time-consuming or as stressful as preparing to run a tabletop game from scratch would be. But it still takes a certain amount of time.
I've been steadfastly ignoring the fact that election day is fast approaching. Need to do some research on that too.
Um, I should note that I owe several of you email, and in some cases have owed you email for quite some time. Apologies. I'll try to get to it soon.
I'm sure there's other stuff worth mentioning, but I'm all out of brain.