Perhaps not the best choice of birthday week

Saturday, I spent much of the day full of mullygrubs and out of sorts, for various minor reasons. Kam came over in the evening, despite my warning her that I was in a bad mood (thanks, Kam!), and we had dinner, and my mood improved somewhat, and then on the spur of the moment went to see The Secret World of Arrietty, which I still think should've just been called The Borrowers but nobody asked me.

I didn't love it, but I liked it. It was largely charming, and had lovely moments and images, and good characters. I felt that the antagonist was a little too one-note evil/crazy (so I didn't love the plot), and that Arrietty's mother was a little too one-note panicky; but it was worth seeing.

So Saturday ended in a better mood than it began.

Sunday, unfortunately, was mostly stressful. Had a lot of magazine work to do, and a lot of day-job work to do, and was so stressed about both that I cancelled likely-to-be-fun boardgaming plans.

Got a fair bit done, but not nearly everything.

Monday: more stress. About twelve hours of day job, with a break for a couple hours toward the end to do magazine stuff. See, the quarter ends next weekend, and so of course everyone wants to launch stuff before the end of the quarter, and part of my job is reviewing documentation (kind of like editing) and giving approval for it to launch. So if I want to avoid having the documentation be the only thing holding up a launch (something that I think most tech writers live in fear of, even though it almost never happens—usually when a launch is delayed it turns out that there are much bigger issues delaying the launch, and documentation is just a convenient scapegoat), I have to do a lot of reviewing this week.

Especially because I'll be off work Thursday and Friday. So I had three launches to review, starting Friday; I thought I'd gotten the first one done over the weekend, but there was much more to do on Monday, so I barely started the second one on Monday. I've now more or less finished the second one very late tonight (Tuesday), so I can do the third one on Wednesday, at least in theory, if nothing else comes up. Oog.

Meanwhile, Kam is swamped with preparation for a final on Thursday, and I have neither the time nor the social energy to do a big group dinner. So I think my big birthday plans will involve staying late at work to finish a review.

Things will improve on Thursday: off work, and Mary Anne arrives. Friday we're heading up to Walnut Creek for FOGCon, through Sunday.

I think and hope that my workload will be significantly lighter next week. So maybe I should've declared my birthday week to start on Thursday and go through next Thursday?

Dunno. And really no time to think about it; gotta go sleep.

On the plus side, people have started posting birthday greetings on my Facebook wall, which never fails to cheer me up. Thank you, all! There are many reasons to dislike Facebook, but getting a wave of birthday greetings every year is almost enough reason in itself for me to stay on it, even without the other things I like about it.

(I know some people dislike the impersonality of brief "Happy birthday!" notes, but they don't feel impersonal to me; I bask in them.)

(Which reminds me: I try to keep up with birthdays on FB, but sometimes I miss some. There were two people in particular, sometime in the past two weeks, that I kept meaning to say happy birthday to, but kept forgetting, and once it's after midnight, FB doesn't show the birthdays any more, so I don't even know who the people in question were. Which I think is too bad; it ought to show the last couple days when you say Show All. Anyway, so I apologize to those friends whose birthdays I neglected to acknowledge. I meant well.)

I should note that things are not awful. I'm not having a miserable birthday week, just a stressful and busy one that doesn't leave time for things like fun. And things will be a lot better by 24 hours from now. And all my problems are privileged-people problems anyway.

But I will be glad when I'm done with work tomorrow.

One Response to “Perhaps not the best choice of birthday week”

  1. irilyth

    Happy birthday! Hope the rest of the week is less stressful.

    reply

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