permanent midnight

cramping shoulders, mild excema, poor posture, dehydration, insomnia, loss of appetite, headaches, jitters.


These are a few of the signs that I'm encountering crushing stress. Ironically, were I still in school, this would be finals week. I thought such weeks would be few and far between when I finished schooling, but it turns out that at a startup, they happen about once a month. It's really wearing me out.

If I make it through:
tomorrow, I get to decorate my tree.
Wednesday, I get to go to a movie.
Thursday, I get to put together my new computer.
Friday, I get to sleep in.
Next Tuesday, I get to go to dinner on the boss' dime.
The next two weeks, I'll be off work for a week.
The end of the month, I'll have thrown two epic parties and finished the most dynamic year of my life, all while playing 3 games of speed chess.

You wouldn't be able to sleep either.

I got a feeling that something is not right. Had it all day. I hope it fixes itself. If I stop focusing on doing something, my heart starts racing and I'll stare blankly at something, unable to focus beyond the adrenaline. It's really starting to freak me out.

I found this weird snaily type thing in my bed this evening and it was freaking me out for hours until I figured out that it probably fell onto my shirt on my way home, which I then put on my bed. Finding unidentifiable biological things between one's sheets is never a happy experience. It certainly didn't help the preexisting stress situation.

I programmed the furnace to turn on this morning but it refused to cooperate, even on override. Instead a suspiciously musty smell has been emanating from the intake all day. I secretly hope that tomorrow it will turn back on and I can write it off as a fluke, but I have no idea about the likelihood of that happening.

Got to see the new office space today, it's great except for the front-facing office arrangement. There's only 3 real offices with doors, and they're all too big. There's a large reception area and a mailroom, both of which are basically useless for us. We do get a conference room, which has cubicles in it right now but that should change.



There's a lot of things we'd rather have, but it's really clean space in a great location, so it's really hard to complain. Nearly anything would be better than the cramped bullpen we're in now, so let's be thankful.



I'm going to go crazy if I sit around here all night, so I guess I'l go hit up the video games at Deb's. If I'm going to be grouchy, I'd rather be distracted.

Cable modem's upstairs, CAT5 is strung about the house, and I'm feeling better. There's still an absolute mountain of stuff to do, and it's very hard to take it one evening at a time. I'm starting to understand the cultural idiom of taking years to unpack every box, because when all you've got is 3 hours a day, that's how long it takes.

I strongly doubted the value of my Thinkpad when I purchased it just one quarter before I graduated, but it's turned out to be one of the best purchasing decisions I've ever made. Having something so small, useful, flexible and durable by my side during all this fluttering about the continent(s) has been invaluable. That I got it for only a few hundred dollars after selling old gear is icing on the cake.

Work is a brisk 15-minute mile away. I'm looking forward to being used to it. We're horribly busy this week, as CTIA is next weekend and we've got a bunch of demo stuff there for Jeff and Brent to show off. If you have internet access on your phone, be sure and check out the site. It's improving rapidly and we've got a bunch of neat tricks for your phone to do. I'll probably be roped into doing late nights tomorrow and Wednesday so we can squash all the P1 bugs before the Thursday push to the live site. I haven't worked with the rest of the site much, since I've been doing side projects, so I'm kind of dreading it. I also resent having to still go to work when the house is such a disaster, but it's the only way I can afford this silly space anyway, so I guess I better go. The house isn't going anywhere, but the site sure is.

Moving is best described as an iterative process of evaluation, ownership, chaos, control, refinement, and mastery. It is not a sequential process of evaluate, select, own, master. The mastery phase is temporary, as life changes around your stuff, and you must evaluate again, own the problem, create a mess, tame the mess, perfect things the next day, and make it routine. By the time I had to leave Orchard Meadows, I could make a box of Annie's with my eyes closed. Today, it took about twice as long as it typically would, and involved many unnecessary or inefficient steps.

My nature is to seek perfection in routine and surroundings, to refine until my day rolls by like an ancient river. Moving is a 100-year flood. The river flattens houses, swirling in an angry roar of force until the land is tamed and the flood retires.