Woohoo! Finally, finally, finally, I have finished my rewrites for Shawna. I just backed up the draft, and I feel amazing! Until I finished, I hadn’t even realized just how much of the tension I’ve been feeling over the past few weeks has been the unfinished rewrites hanging over me. When I hit "save", my shoulders relaxed, a wave of relief swept through me... it was just great.

Hurray! I'll start being much more human and less Stress-Machine from now on. (For which Patrick and Nika will probably be really grateful. I haven’t been much fun to live with, lately!)

I'm sitting in Borders on my lunch break, typing this with an apple-cinnamon muffin and cup of tea by my elbow. (They were my bribes to get the rewrites done.) This morning I did training on image-creation and content management for the website, which turned out to be really do-able (sigh of relief) and also -- better yet -- actually surprisingly fun and satisfying. Creating the images reminds me a lot of knitting or sewing -- one of those domestic hobbies that isn’t officially 'Art' but feels very satisfying in a creative way. This whole job is turning out to feel really creative in a way that both thrills and surprises me. When I walked out of the building for lunch, bells were chiming in a cathedral a few blocks away. The sky was grey, but it wasn't raining. I walked down to Borders, which is just across the block -- and then I stopped a moment, just to think: Wow. I have been so lucky. I got exactly the kind of job I wanted (but was afraid I couldn't get), it's less than a half an hour commute from my house, and in one of my favorite parts of town. (At lunch, I can go to a coffee shop, browse a High Street shop, or forage through the thrift stores... not to mention all the restaurants around here.) I feel incredibly lucky.

Which is good, because I have been unbelievably stressed over the past few days, just trying to figure out how to schedule my Real Life around my job. I know I'm hitting this point late -- I’m 28, not 22 -- but still, it is a shock to go from working at home in a very flexible way to working set hours, 10 to 6 every day. Suddenly, I don't know where to fit a whole lot of my favorite things, like hanging out with important, close friends, and even writing. And I haven't even got back to working on my thesis yet... (I made a deal with myself to take this week just for adjusting to the job, and get into the academic work next week.) So the juggling act is turning out -- not surprisingly -- to be really hard right now. But it really is worth it. I'll just be frazzled for a while, I guess...

Happy week, everybody. Sorry for doing such stress-y journal entries yesterday and today! I’ll be back to normal, soon, I promise.