I took a day off this week. I spent all day Sunday convincing myself to spend one single day’s worth of PTO so that I could have an extra day added to my weekend. It was actually incredibly difficult and I only fully committed to my choice when it was one in the morning and I still wasn’t asleep. I just couldn’t imagine trying to do a day of work, much less one of my ten or eleven hour days of work, on so little sleep, so I submitted a PTO request, notified my boss, and changed my alarm time so that I’d wake up with just enough time to work out before my late-morning therapy appointment. I also had another appointment, to get some blood work done as part of monitoring a medication I’m taking, so it made sense to just take the day off, get some rest, and then, as a result of taking the PTO, force myself to work a week of normal, eight-hour days. Part of forcing myself to stick to those normal work days is the fact that I wouldn’t get paid for any overtime I worked until I passed the forty hour mark with non-PTO hours and doing so would also pretty much make taking a PTO day pointless since working those extra hours would negate whatever rest I got. So I’ve done my best to work eight hours days since then and mostly failed because this week wound up being so much busier than I expected, but at least I can just leave early on Friday come hell or high water.

Part of being so busy this week has been the usual crop of new issues cropping up and the last-minute work that needs to be done as we move to wrap up some projects, but some of it has been a result of what an absolutely wild week it has been at the company that employs me. I can’t really talk about it, since it might make it easy to figure out who I work for and I also don’t really want to be on the record as saying any of the thoughts I’ve got about it in a format where the wrong person or people might read it. That’s incredibly unlikely, given the niche nature of my blog, but I’m an incredibly cautious person and I know just how easy it is to find something on the internet. Less so now than before, thanks to the enshitification of most of the popular search engines, but still very easy if you know what to look for or how to look for it. Suffice it to say that it caught me completely off-guard, my team talked about it for an hour and a half afterwards, we’re pretty excited about it, and some things I thought would happen in a more distant future have come to pass. Not a lot has actually changed in anyone’s day-to-day life as a result of this, but the possibility that they MIGHT change is much greater than ever before. It’s kind of exciting, really, but also incredibly draining. There’s a lot going on and everyone can feel the energy shift and it’s adding a subtle undercurrent of tension to everyone’s day.

Which makes it really difficult to sit down and focus on investigating a series of weird software bugs that are probably related but might not be related and might actually be either hardware issues or just quirks of the particular hardware we’re using in our testing [they turned out to be hardware issues]. All of the above are possible and I spent five hours on that today (the day I wrote this, not the day this was posted), which means five hours of other work I planned to do didn’t get done and I STILL don’t know what’s going on. Plus I’ve got fifty other little things piling up that need doing before the end of this week and a rapidly shrinking amount of time to do them in since the last few hours of my day are usually my most productive since there’s no one else around and I can just dig into my work with no distractions. So I’m battling the ever-growing to-do list, my need for rest, and the constant tension of what a weird fucking week this has been. To top it all off, I’m not sure if I’m battling a mild cold or if I’m just finally collapsing from all the stress of the last few weeks of long days and barely-restful weekends [I was, in fact, barely holding myself together, physically speaking], but I’m two steps removed from fully disassociating and I can’t seem to clear my head no matter what I do. I’m just entirely off kilter and I can’t seem to get back on it despite trying to take a restful week.

I’m not really sure that I benefited from taking things easy this week. I’m pretty sure I’d be worse off, energy-wise if I hadn’t, but I think I’d be less stressed right now since I wouldn’t be multiple days behind on blog posts and still unable to finish a chapter of Infrared Isolation to save my life. I really hope that, when I can finally get a decent night’s sleep this weekend, that’ll be the missing piece that’ll snap it all together [it was not. It certainly helped, but I’m still struggling]. It’s not like I’m completely exhausted or out of it. I still have my moments of focus, even if they don’t last very long, and I can cobble myself together enough to do most things that need doing any given day. It’s just a lot more effort than usual, which really feels at odds with the whole “taking it easy this week” thing I’m trying to do. Still, no matter what isn’t done on Friday when I hit my forty-hour mark, I’m gone. There’s nothing so urgent that it can’t wait until Monday. I just really don’t want to spend my weekend with that hanging over my head as I do a huge amount of D&D prep and, as I told myself I’d do in exchange for taking it easy this week, prepare my taxes. It really doesn’t count as a break if all I’m doing is moving the stress from one place to another…