My week got better

[liv]

I was really quite stressed on Monday. A major project I lead on at work is in crisis, with the other two key people abruptly about to retire. We had a discussion in which everybody carefully didn't blame me for the project not going well, but between the lines it's clear that my inexperience at leading projects of this scale meant that I didn't bail sooner and I probably should have. Instead I've been trying to throw a lot of effort into avoiding a crisis which in fact wasn't really avoidable because of external circumstances. On top of that I have two fairly big deadlines this week, and I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed in general. Hence my excessively grumpy post about Purim; I basically love working with the community, but I was just right in the middle of feeling like everybody wants stuff from me that I can't provide.

I had lots of good chats with friends, rysmiel and angelofthenorth and hatam_soferet and my ever wonderful husband. I drank tea and caught up on sleep a bit (well, maybe not as much as I would have liked, but I stayed up late because I was enjoying talking to people who make me happier). I wrote a grumpy post here on DW and everybody made helpful and sympathetic comments, you are all wonderful, thank you so much. Contact with my friends goes a long way to making me feel better when I'm stressed.

And being the kind of procrastinator / last minute producer that I am, having the hard deadlines actually made me settle down and do some of the stuff I've been dithering about for a while. Of course actually getting creative jobs done makes me feel a whole lot better, particularly in the direction of being more confident that I can in fact get organized enough to do all the rather large heap of work, community and personal tasks on my to-do list.

I had a really great meeting with a student whom I'm supervising for his first year mini-dissertation. He has some really cool ideas for what he wants to write about, I'm actually genuinely interested in his project, which is going to make working with him a lot of fun.

Yesterday I had a really great day: I got useful things done, then I went to the first of my Arabic conversation taster course. I am not at all surprised to be reminded that learning new languages is really fun! I mean, it was really basic, tourist stuff like hi how-are-you I'm-fine-thanks-and-you, but still pleasing, just the little quirks that even basic bits of languages have. If you translate the Arabic phrases literally you get things like: I'm fine => I'm with goodness, and how are you => how's the condition? And we got to one of those minimal pairs of totally different words that are only distinguished by diacritics; in Swedish it's duck versus spirit, in Arabic house and girl. Actually my secret goal from this class is to learn to pronounce the difference between ح and خ

Also my little sister texted me saying she wanted to send me and jack an anniversary present. I said it's not our anniversary until 2016, but she said "it's still an anniversary when the year turns" and she is going to send us a present anyway. And it is true that it has been 365 days since jack and I got married, which is a pleasing thought.

And today I realized that one of my deadlines isn't actually today, it's 28^th March. And I thought I'd lost something irreplaceable I'd borrowed from a friend but it turns out I in fact returned it and had forgotten doing so, so that also made me feel a whole lot better.