Why I'm stressed, fat, and not blogging much...

If you subscribe to the madanthony rss feed (link available on the right!) you've probably noticed a lack of new posts of late.

For a plethora of reasons, I've had very little time of late. That has caused a number of things to suffer, including trips to the gym and blogging, along with sleep.

There are a couple reasons for this. The first is work. For the last couple months we've been in the process of migrating to Active Directory, which has meant touching every PC on the college campus where I work. Throw in the fact that it's the end of our fiscal year, which means tons of new equipment to set up, as departments spend down their left over budgets, then tear into their new ones after the fiscal year rolls over. So I've been working some overtime trying to catch up, not to mention having absolutely no slack time to do anything. Our work order ticket system, which typically hovers between about 5 and 15 open work orders, at one point today had 48 open tickets.

I've also been doing the bar trivia thing twice a week, plus we had the championship game on Saturday (bsom and I placed squarely midpack, which wasn't bad considering that the winning teams all seemed to have 10 people on them...). It's also yard sale season, so I've been trying to hit them up. I've also had a couple other minor social things, a hamfest, and am trying to get back into eBaying.

That means I've also had less time to spend at the gym, which isn't helped by the fact that the college gym I go to is on summer hours, which means it closes early - which makes it hard to fit in, especially if I'm working late. One of my summer goals was to lose some weight. Instead, I've been gaining weight and finding my pants and shirts snugger - because I've been eating badly and not exersizing. I'm trying (with limited success) to get out of my bad eating habits, but getting to the gym is still tough.

And work in general has been making me angry. I'm drowning in work, with people asking me why stuff isn't done, and becoming frustrated with the fact that I don't have a good answer besides that I'm not a good enough employee to get everything done that I've been tasked with.

I'm also less than thrilled about the fact that I was planning on taking a couple days off only to have it fall through. I have a family function in a couple weekends, and found out that there was also a hamfest near my parent's house that weekend. I figured I'd take off Friday, drive up, hit the ham on saturday, family it up on Sunday, and drive back on Monday. I asked my boss, because our calendar said he and my other coworker was off, and he assured me that it was a mistake and he would be in. Turns out he won't be, so I had to retract the day off and email my mom. Which means I'll have to drive up Friday night after work and battle rush-hour traffic.

I seldom take days off. I'm going to lose the 3 personal days that my employer gives in two weeks because I haven't used them, and because we were told not to take days off because of the AD project. I'm also maxed out on vacation days (which means I've stopped accumulating vacation time because I have too much). This isn't to say I care that much- I'm single, childless, don't travel, and my family lives 3 states away - I don't really need to take off, and would rather work on my career. But it seems like everyone else manages to get time off when they want it, while when I want to take a day off, something else always comes up - training, other people's vacations, projects - that prevent me from taking off. And on the rare occasions that I do take off, higher-ups start sending out emails about how smoothly everything ran without me there, which makes me start thinking they may realize they don't really need me.

I know all this will pass at some point - I'll fit in more gym time, and hopefully at least stop gaining weight. Work will slow down and overtime will end, which will suck for my wallet but be good for my waist and sanity. Bar trivia will end (or become very rare) once bsom's son is born. I'll run out of stuff to sell on eBay. But right now I'm going nuts. I wake up in the morning and don't want to get out bed because I dread the thought of going to work. I go through the day wanting to scream, wanting to punch someone, wondering how other people in other departments have time to sit around and talk while I'm trying to run around getting stuff done and battling a flow of tickets that comes faster than I can fix them, trying to (to borrow a line from a Brother Ali song) ride a bike in the sand. I look at the mess of my house and wonder if I'll ever have any time to clean it, look at the emptiness of my life and wonder if I'll ever figure out a way to fill it.

And look at the emptiness of this blog and wonder if I'll ever get around to posting regularly again.