Yes, OK, I'm Stressed

You cannot believe how busy the last few days at work have been. Frantic & mind-numbing doesn't even come near.

I've been churning out reports like a mad-woman, while everybody around me seems to be fairly relaxed & not too busy. I realised that I'm totally stressed out when my brain, when I got asked to talk about one of my recent projects in a meeting, went like this

For a good 30 seconds, I didn't know where I was & what that person opposite me was talking about. Thank god the rush of blood to my brain got me going again, and apparently I've turned it all around quite impressively. But that total blank was scary.

And just when I thought I'd finally had some breathing space, my boss agreed to turn around a report that takes about 1 day just getting the data ready in, you guessed it, a day. I almost burst into tears when he told me. Cue another afternoon & morning of intense busy-ness, but I made it. I produced spreadsheets of doom & in the end wrote a nice 2 pager, telling him to please check the data as, honestly, I wasn't able to tell anymore if it made sense or not. I then had to disappear to a meeting he didn't go to coz he was too busy, but one of us had to go.

Turns out he didn't check the data & the next morning we got hit by an email asking us if a certain percentage is right, because it contradicted something we'd run in another system (which does happen, they're two totally different beasts). So we ended up checking everything, and of course it was just that percentage that everybody wanted to talk about that was wrong (I'd run the data on the wrong time period, go me).

I don't make mistakes very often, but it seems that if I make them, I go for the big, important fuck ups.

We managed to correct everything without looking too stupid, but since then I'm beating myself up about it. Because I'm like that.

By Friday afternoon I was so burned out that I spent the last 4 hours at work just bimbling about, running data & trying to look busy. I really couldn't think anymore.

I so need a holiday.

Friday evening was much better. I went into town after work to meet up with John, we went to that lovely vegetarian South Indian (Sagar) I've been to with Arnon & Cara when they were visiting (it even has a VEGAN menu!!!) & caught up on what's been happening in our lives since we've last met. Really good & it helped de-stress me a little.

Today I trekked over to North London for a bit of Burning Man planning. Cue major excitement (Yay! Squee!). We've sent out emails to the RV companies asking for quotes, and once we've secured a vehicle we'll get on to booking flights & hotel rooms. I'm so looking forward to it, it's going to be so much better than last time because this time I'm involved in the planning.

But first I'm off to India in about 5 weeks. Still need to sort out camera & travel insurance, also need to loose some weight because otherwise I won't have anything to wear.

At least in terms of travel, this year is looking a lot more promising than the last :)