I'm writing this ahead of time, so one presumes that I did, in fact, make it until Friday. If not, well...
I'm laughing. As much as this last week or so has been interesting in that I've been attempting to do the work of four, I've been too busy to worry about much of anything, really. And I do like being busy. Far superior to being bored. So much so, that I am not looking forward to a return to that state. Not that my life is ever really boring, except... No. I'm not going to whine.
Whining is never necessary, nor does it help anything at all. I didn't let my children get away with it when they were little, and I'm not going to inflict it on the public at large. I'm just going to square up my jaw, look at it as a lesson learned, and do my best to figure out how to fix the issue. I can't control everything in my life. What I can, I will.
And I will try not to beat myself up over this. I could tell myself it's a stupid thing to be stressed about, but I'd be wrong. It's not actually stupid to worry that being underutilized is a problem. It's not just that it makes me go a little crazy(er) and feel bored. It's a valid and bad sign because it could mean that my position is unstable and unnecessary. Above all, I need to be needed. If not, why am I here, doing this?
Why, indeed?
The weekend is coming, and with it, I'll be busy again. Busier than I want to be, which is a separate and unique problem to itself.
Also, the verdict on dictation? Unless there's a way to generate mostly clean copy from voice to text via Dragon that doesn't involve me doing manual transcription, it's a failure. From failure, we learn. I've learned that while using my commute time to generate words seems like a fantastic idea and a time saver, the end result of dirty dictation is more editing than I have the time or energy to deal with. Which has two major manuscripts completely stalled through my inability to even. They need so much editing at this point I'm half tempted to scrap 30K words and begin anew. It's that bad. Months of work. I can't. I just can't right now.