The longest "short week" in human existence

- or at least my personal existence - is finally over. It's SATURDAY!!! Oh, glorious Saturday. Sourdough pancakes (had to feed the starter) and shopping, yeah!

This week was so incredibly long and stressful, I can't believe it was only 4 calendar days. The cold sapped my energy and work took everything left over. Thursday's departmental meeting lasted 5 brutal hours and afterward I felt as emotionally drained as if I'd been in a bad car wreck. We all did - the consensus was we'd rather take a beating than sit through one of our departmental meetings. It's so exhausting, we all hate and dread the meetings. We have to go through every project, bit by bit, piece by excruciating little piece, and figure out where we are and what needs to be done, and it's unbelievably difficult. I woke up yesterday morning convinced it was Saturday because Thursday was so godawful long and draining, and nearly cried when I realized I had to go to work again. It was that bad.

The meetings would be difficult under the best of circumstances but it's made worse by a reporting process from hell. The problem is fairly straightforward - we're a young company experiencing fierce growing pains. Our reports developed haphazardly, as information was needed it was thrown into the process, and now it's an unwieldly, uncoordinated, lurching wreck of a report, with entries for things that don't really matter, duplicate categories of information, the same event is called three different things and nobody's sure what the term means anymore, it's just FUBAR. I'm taking on the thankless task of analyzing our reporting process to see if there's a way we can make our project meeting less like 5 hours of root canal without anesthesia. I think it can be done. Each department has a different perspective and focus, each needs information from Land (that's us) and each has its own idea of a report form, and This Shit Must Cease. We need to develop a company hymn book and make everybody sing on the same page, and it looks like that task on the land development side will fall to moi. It may take some time and still more bickering, but I think it can be done. I need to take some time to sit down with our COO and talk through company-wide processes so we can coordinate this stuff. It's never going to be easy but it doesn't have to be this painful.

It's in the 30s out there, which I know means nothing to you Northerners but to us that's like Arctic Cold. I think all the new plants survived okay, everything looks perky. It takes a good freeze into the 20s to really damage them, and (fingers crossed) we won't go there this winter. It does happen.

Alas, the ripple Project Linus afghan met the frog pond. I'd forgotten how much yarn it takes to crochet an afghan, and it became obvious fast that I didn't have enough of the pretty ocean colors to make what I had in mind. Adding other colors to compensate would have ruined it. Back to the drawing board on that one.

Girl's simple mistake rib scarf is almost done, she should be able to wear it this evening, and she'll need it. My Koigu scarf is about a week behind in the completion pipeline, hers goes so much faster I wanted to knock it out while it's this cold and she can really use it.

WW meetings will start on Thursday - Girl has evening classes Mon-Tu-Wed. The gym will start again today. My cold is mostly gone and an hour on the treadmill with an audio book will be a good start back into the exercise habit.

I thought of a lot of things to blog about during the week but just didn't have the energy to do it. Maybe this evening, when I'm freshly shopped and exercised, my head will clear enough to say something reasonably intelligent. But right now the limp, whimpering brain cells left alive in my brain just keep crooning, "It's Saturrrdaaaayyyy...."

Girl is still sleeping. When she gets her happy ass out of bed, we are off to major mall madness. I want low-heeled boots. The office floors, they are cold.