Wow, the past couple of weeks at work have just been...wow. Somebody please remind me never to arrange to have all three of the following occurring in the same week ever again:

• A release of beta documentation to beta test customers for which I am responsible for 5! (five!) freakin' documents, plus a section of the release notes. (4 of the documents are fairly small, but, still. Five!)


• A release of another product, for which I am writing the release notes.


• A really incredibly painful urinary tract infection.

Oh, so not fun. I ended up spending just about all of last weekend working, and calling in some last-minute help from a couple of my coworkers, and somehow everything got done. Whew.

Also, antibiotics are wonderful things.

The big release frenzy wrapped up Wednesday night, fortunately, and things have been returning to a more normal pace since then. Early Thursday afternoon, my boss came by and said, "You've been working really hard lately. If you don't have anything urgent to do, go home. And feel free not to come in tomorrow either."

So, I went to Draeger's and bought some gourmet extra-dark chocolate. (I got some 99% cacao stuff. This stuff is allegedly so intense that you can't even chew it - you break off little pieces and let them melt on your tongue.) While I was there, I was approached by an older woman who said, "I can tell that you're a chocolate person - can you recommend a good dark chocolate?" I sent her off with a bar of Dagoba New Moon. My good deed for the day, I suppose.

Then I went home, and Daniel and I took a walk in the park, and had dinner.

Friday, I went in to work just long enough to take care of some urgent stuff and attend some meetings. We had a pleasant dinner with a local friend and an out-of-town friend at a French-bistro place called Left Bank, which was much better than I remember it being the last time I was there. (The last time I was there was probably about 2 years ago, so it's not too surprising.)

This morning, I went grocery shopping, and mailed off a short story submission to the Interstitial Arts anthology, because, while I'm not sure that it's "interstitial", I'm quite sure that I've been sitting on it for ages because while I think it's a perfectly good story, I can't figure out which of the major science fiction or fantasy magazines would want it. And I made a pretty decent pot of coffee, and chatted with Daniel.

On the whole, I'm sort of being stunned by the sensation of having a life again. I'm not entirely certain what to do with myself.