The boys go back to school tomorrow. I am already thinking ahead to the next day I’ll be able to take the day off from work, now that Jeff has a job again and the boys will be at school, and I’ll be able to have a real and true day TO MYSELF. The past couple of weeks at work, I’ve felt like I’ve been treading water — or like I’m a woman on the verge of burnout. It feels wrong to think of taking a day off from work when I have a ton of things to do there, while at the same time the thought of setting aside a day to recharge my batteries sounds tempting and quite heavenly.
That’s basically where I’m at: feeling scattered, split in 20 different directions, mostly at work but also sometimes at home. I feel like all the extra stuff I’ve had to do this year related to work — going to my first TRB Meeting last January and participating in a poster session, the trip to New Orleans in June for SLA and NTKN (though I fell in love with the city), all my conference calls for the various groups I’m involved with, and the duties that go along with them — all of this piled on top of my daily work has made it so hard to keep up, to make any sort of progress, and it’s worn me down to the point where I wish I could withdraw from all the tasks and activities that aren’t directly related to my regular work in my own library. It makes me want to withdraw, period, as far into my books and reading as I can go without losing touch with the “real world.” HA! A mental health day wouldn’t be enough, I think maybe a mental health WEEK would be much more beneficial!
But beyond the fact that my next day off (whenever I have it) will be a day ALONE, two other things give me a bit of hope: first, that I resigned my spot from one of the groups I was involved with, so that eliminates a two-hour conference call each month, plus occasional duties related to that task force; and second, the conference I’ll attend in Madison next month will be shorter than my January and June trips, and is the last work trip I have in the foreseeable future. And also, I’ve stopped writing conference call minutes, and that has been a relief.
Finally, although yesterday gave me some difficult moods, particularly during our family outing to the bowling alley, I’m pleased that I got my regular housecleaning all done today, and have also been reading a fantastic book in which I can easily lose myself: The Passage by Justin Cronin. I started it on Wednesday or Thursday, and hope to reach page 200 (at least) before I go to bed tonight. It’s a true chunkster, over 700 pages, and it is thrilling to me. I love going into a novel and away from my own life for a while.
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