Shovelling again tonight – just enough to make a path for the dog to get in and out of the house – and by the looks of things, again tomorrow morning if we’re going to get the car out of the driveway and make it to work. I feel the pressure starting to mount nowadays – things are literally piling up at work and I am currently working in an area of physical desktop that is about 22 by 10 inches with Babelesque file piles starting to scrape the sky all around every other available square inch of imitation wood grain formica. I am juggling files and have many, many things on the go every day at work; constant multi-tasking has never been my thing, I’m more of a focus on one large project kind of guy and the number of figurative balls I am precariously juggling puts me progressively more and more on edge, as if each additional file added to the juggling act is not so much a ball, but a furiously revving chainsaw or a hissing and seriously pissed off King Cobra. The only solution to that work problem is to put in more hours at the office, and more hours at the office mean fewer hours at home – where there are still tasks to be accomplished in order to effectuate the Great Migration to Juniorvania March 14th, 2008.
To further ratchet up the sphincter-tightening factor, some of the folk I’ve had to deal with at work over the last couple of days have been of the very high maintenance variety and what that means is that it takes me three times as long to accomplish every simple little task as it otherwise would if i were dealing with rational and reasonable people instead (psst! If you find any of those types wandering around, point them out to me).
I refuse to believe that Spouse’s illness is beginning to dwell within me. I perceive the runny-ness of my nose; I experience a gelatin-filled melon where my head used to be; strange and sometimes vaguely fluorescent mucoses are produced at an alarming and astonishing rate in various areas of my body, quite without any concerted effort on my part – and yet I am sworn to deny the existence of the foul virus. It is not the centre of my existence and experience in this world right now – though I choose to memorialize the absence of this state of being on teh Intarwebs for all eternity, or some reasonable e-facsimile thereof, herein. Frankly, there is some shit up with which I will not put.
I am exhausted and need to drag my bones upstairs and store them and the sack in which they are packaged between the covers for eight or nine glorious hours so that Mr. Sandman can grant me the strength to tackle the frozen white crystalline menace that stands between me and a place I desperately do not want to go to tomorrow.
How’s that for a pep talk?
I know how you feel, about the snow at least. I have nowhere else to put it. I actually have to lift the shovel up above my shoulders to deposit whatever snow I am removing from the front steps or, even worse, the driveway. I especially feel for you knowing that you do not have any sides to your driveway to deposit snow. I at least have one side that I can pile it on.
As for the piling mounds of work, I hope you experience a thaw there too. I find that when things start to go real squirrelly at work and I get behind the best thing to do is stomp my feet and get all huffy… and cry a little… ask someone else to do it… then continue on when all else fails and think of the rewards that this will surely provide in the future.
Good Luck! And take some ColdFX. It works!
Oh, I’m all over the ColdFX – am completing the final day of the three day cycle today. Despite all my moaning (above), I’m convinced the stuff works; I have no doubt this cold would be much worse without it because I do go through periods of relative normalcy.
I will try stomping and holding my breath at work, but if that doesn’t get rid of some of this shit, I am going to have to seriously consider a controlled burn, a la the Department of Forestry.
More random connections — going back through your back posts trying to figure out where, precisely, you are in Ontario, it looks like you might be in Hamilton, on the Lake and thus subject to the cruel effects of weather in a way that, say, Buffalo would be as well. It gives me a new appreciation of my dad’s choice to uproot after going to grad school at McMaster(how about that for random coincidences?) and settle near Spokane. Although considering the years we had to shovel snow off the roof to keep the ominous creaking to a murmur, maybe he just was attracted to the cold (his first stop after Taiwan was U of Alberta — hooray, prarie cold!)?
I’m not sure if I can really blame figgy (and daycare) for the astonishing number of colds we’ve had this year. My nose has been set to permanent drip since October, though …
@Mike:
Yes, I’m in the Hammer. How long ago in the past was your Dad at Mac? That does, as they say, put the “dink” in “co-inkydink” – the crazy randomness of all the connects is kind of fun, isn’t it? Sounds like your pops made the better choice – I don’t imagine there are too many film crews setting up in Spokane and using portions of the downtown to double for burned out Harlem, the way they did for Hulk 2 here in Steeltown – across from the building I work at, actually.
As for the U of Alberta, I have a good friend who tells me, from time to time, that he used to live in South Edmonton – at which point I habitually remind him that there is no such thing as “south” Edmonton, just “less north” Edmonton. Brother, it is COLD in that province, save and except for the occasional chinook.
As for figgy and her posse giving you colds; Dude, I have no doubt that you’ve been impressing upon her the importance of sharing, and she’s just following Daddy’s teachings!
Let’s see … got married in ’69, so he was out of school for a few years by then … I’m guessing roughly around 1966-7ish?
Spookaloo, if you’ve seen them, played host to such luminous films as Vision Quest, Benny and Joon, and Smoke Signals, but alas, nothing quite on the level of a Hulking movie. (Of the three, I’d watch Smoke Signals again and I’ll try to dig up the most redeeming part of VQ, the opening credits/scenes where he jogs through most of the scenic parts of Spokane on the way to his job at the Ridpath Hotel.
Ha — sharing colds — it’s just like those old anti-drug commercials: “I learned it from you, Dad … I LEARNED IT FROM YOU!!”
I was wondering when he was there because Eugene Levy and Martin Short were McMaster grads (and Hamilton boys) who met at Mac and went on, of course, to do SCTV together. I would think at ’66/’67 would probably be a couple of years too early for Levy and Short to be yet raising hell on campus – no doubt the student body’s attention was instead focused on Canada’s Centennial Celebration on July 1st, 1967. I’ve seen Benny and Joon, but neither of the other flicks…
This link is kind of ironic. It is to a talk about time management that I listened to instead of doing the work that I should really be doing. I guess that the best customers for time management and productivity web sites are not those that are well organized and manage their time well and avoid wasting time on productivity sites. It’s an interesting talk nonetheless.
http://www.43folders.com/2008/02/14/time-attention-talk
I’ll figure out how to edit posts to YouTube at some point (maybe when figgy is old enough to show me how) — here’s the bit from Vision Quest. The novel by the same name, by Terry Davis, isn’t a bad read, if you ever run across it.