Long Week

For all that I was only in the office for three days this week, it's been an incredibly long week. Monday I was off. Tuesday I was out of the office in meetings, followed by a two hour drive home. Now I am buried in data mangling. Because my co-workers are uncomfortable dealing with the data in electronic form, they insist on having paper copies of the data to make changes to. They also tend to not get rid of the old, obsolete and incorrect lists. If something isn't found on the "current" list, they bring out all the previous lists and then things get mixed up. This is going to lead to disaster. My being called on to produce various paper copies of data subsets on a daily basis means I am unable to analyze the data we have or to even get caught up on data entry/cleaning. I have been spending most evenings trying to get ahead of the data though lately the rest of my life isn't cooperating. I end up holding together the universe for everybody else instead. On top of that, I have an investigation report to write on a cluster of photokeratitis cases caused by a damaged sodium halide lamp. I have no idea when I'm going to get that written, but I'd like it to be done by the end of the week.

I haven't had an evening or an afternoon to do whatever I want in weeks. Not even when I had my day off on Monday. Ugh. It won't happen this weekend either. If I don't get this whole bunch of data entry done this weekend, I don't think I'll have a chance to get it done for another week. I have to get it off the plate. Particularly since the next 1500 pages of data will start arriving on Friday.

All I want is an uninterrupted evening to just do whatever I want, without having to do housework or regular work. To be able to take a long hot bath and read a book or watch a movie and knit for a whole evening. That would be nice. It's good to have a goal, right?