Don't ask me

My god, this week's been hectic. All at once, I've had shedloads of work piling up and barely time to think.

It's not helped by the fact that I've been ignoring sleep a fair bit lately, getting about six hours' sleep a night on average. To quote Iona (since she's said it so beautifully):

Sleep and I are having a long-distance relationship. We write, I think of her often, but we're just not spending the time. I'm starting to feel like we're star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the tracks who aren't permitted to see each other. Rather than the truth, which is that I keep standing her up.

Ooh, yeah. I know that one well. And the thing is, I don't survive well on little sleep. If I'm just left to sleep, I will, no waking up. Even when I had school holidays for weeks on end, and presumably my body had all the sleep it needed, I'd sleep for nine, ten, eleven hours until someone or something woke me up. I can get very run down very easily without sleep, and it's therefore quite dumb of me to stay up so late. It's really, really dumb of me to stay up late watching episodes of Angel - I very recently bought series 2 from Amazon secondhand, on the cheap. And I've only seen that series once, and at least - oh - a year ago? Oh no, actually, almost exactly a year ago (I know this because February half-term last year was when I ploughed through series 4 of Buffy in a week, trying to get it over with so that I could move onto Angel). So it's still quite gripping for me right now.

The days this week have just flashed past at an incredible pace due to them being so hectic. This would be good, but I need to get more things done. I haven't been in this position before, but unfortunately I've just started being given a number of extra projects because, it seems, they like my previous work. (Last week was also apparently National Praise-Cathy Week - I had two glowing compliments on my work via email, and also half a kilogram (about 1lb., you Imperial types) of Galaxy chocolate as a thank-you for sorting a problem. Last week was fun ;-) )

But this week, then, has been go, go, go all the way. There have been two meetings, one of which I was told about on the day at 9am (which explains why I was wearing jeans - I didn't know I had a meeting to go to), and the other of which was arranged about a month ago, and my Outlook reminder went off an hour and ten minutes later than I set it for, ten minutes after the meeting started, and thus I was late.

I had to put off some largeish jobs until the next day, which I don't recall having to do before thus far in my employment. (By the way, last week was my 25th week of working, which means I'm now more than halfway through my contract.) So I was stuck with doing them today, which was basically data entry all day.

Apart from the 60 or so people profiles that I had to copy and paste from Word into about 60 HTML tables, which took a long time, I was also typing out and marking up a list which is, in parts, a nested nested nested list (it's going to be a drop-down - well, pop-out - departmental tree structure menu) and, furthermore, has about 250 list items. I found flipping between screens for copying and pasting to be incredibly distracting, and bad for my eyes, so I quickly decided that the simplest way would in fact be to scribble all of the information down quickly, and then retype. Although my fingers haven't been appreciating it, my tired eyes and brain certainly were.

My exhaustion and the monotony of the work inevitably meant that my mind found the time to drift off a fair bit, and bizarrely - I say "bizarrely" since we're having freezing weather at the moment - I began to have the strange feeling that it was a summer day outside. Due to my trance-like state I started getting tiny slivers of flashbacks to my long-lost childhood (okay, it wasn't that long ago) and the feeling of sitting on the grass outside at school in high summer. It was an incredibly vivid memory for the instant that it lasted - I just had the edge of it before I came to, and it faded again.