Christmas was a hell of a day for me. I started the day by slicing off part of my finger, followed that up by putting spoiled cream in my wife’s coffee, had one dog crap in the car on the way to my sister-in-law’s, had the second dog brazenly steal a turkey leg from the kitchen counter, nearly lost one of my son’s hearing aids, and capped the night by watching my Broncos get eviscerated by the Kansas City Chiefs and eliminated from playoff contention.
Today was not one of those days that I sprung out of bed ready to conquer the world. Though my attitude did improve somewhat when I unwrapped my finger (not the sort of gift one hopes for during the holidays) and discovered that I’d done a much better job cleaning and wrapping it then I originally thought. But when the best thing you can say about your morning is, “Hey, I don’t have to go to the doctor today and get this wound properly closed,” you’re not exactly winning.
It’s hard getting back into the groove of things after a long weekend off. Generally, I do some sort of work over the weekend, even if it’s just catching up on emails. But this weekend, I shutdown my computer after a lunch meeting on Friday and did not even take it out of my bag again until this morning. That almost never happens, but there was the Festivus party on Friday, the subsequent hangover on Saturday, and then Christmas on Sunday so there were extenuating circumstances.
But when I’m not on top of my email I get this feeling that things must be out of control and so I dread sitting down and opening my computer after any sort of break. Oftentimes nothing is actually on fire, and intellectually I know that, but the lizard brain makes me feel preemptively irritated and overwhelmed and I really hate that feeling.
So, after bossing around the kids for a while — this is just day 11 of an 18-day winter break — I worked on pruning the “annoying” things off my to-do list: design revisions for a client in food delivery, software updates on a website for an IT company, chasing a client who owes us web content in advance of a January 2nd go-live deadline, ordering printing for new collateral for the big store, getting my inbox down from about 60 unreads to 0.
The company that provides my online billing solution that we use to invoice and collect credit card payments from clients is upgrading their system and they notified me last week that I would not be able to participate in that upgrade if I didn’t give up my current credit card processing and payment gateway and replace with theirs. So the wife and I sat down and looked at all the credit card statements today to figure out what the financial impact of changing all that would be. In my case, the difference is negligible.
Also, it’s difficult to type “negligible” with your right pointer finger all taped up.
Tomorrow I’ll start chipping away at some bigger stuff.