To say the past week or so has been a whirlwind of activity would be something of a massive understatement. Between all the goings on at the office and then running up to see my parents in the middle of the week and then coming home to try and tidy up the apartment for the first time in a couple of solid weeks. Thankfully a late-night cleaning spree took care of the apartment, most things considered, and I managed to get my warm-weather clothes all laundered so I have clean short-sleeved shirts to wear now that the temperatures are going up high enough that I can’t pretend it’s just a passing event.

Mopped the floors, vaccummed all over, moved my cold weather clothes to the back of the closet and the warm weather ones forward…the only thing left to do is that real bout of spring cleaning I’ve been meaning to do, where I pile up a bunch of items I don’t want anymore and then call a junk service to come and take it all away. I could use a little help with the project though, so I might conscript an unwitting someone to lend me a hand.

That being said though, things are the office have taken a turn for the depressing; we lost a few people and the funding to hire more help has been frozen, so while the workload remains as high as it was at the end of my last major project back in March, it looks like we won’t get any help to deal with the pressure and the increased workload anytime soon. It’s a bit dispiriting, to be blunt, and I’m not sure what I want to do about it. In the interim, I’ll just hang on and see what happens, I suppose.

In other news, Otakon is coming soon, and I should probably go ahead and confirm the reservations and see if there are any upgrades available. It’ll probably be another full house this year. I think I’ll need to pick up an aero-bed to accommodate everyone. This year I have a little bit of a shopping list too – A few things I’m particularly interested in. We’ll see how well that works out when it’s actually time. I would say I have a lot of prep to do, but honestly, I don’t think I have that much to be done if I want things to go nice and smoothly. Sometimes you just have to let things happen the way they’re going to happen.

In other news, the warm weather always makes me tired – I have to admit, I feel more creative and interesting during the fall and winter than in the spring and summer. I feel like I could be doing more if I had more energy – writing more, expanding more, spending more time putting energy into my dreams. I know they’re all opportunities right there in front of me, but in some ways I’m not totally sure if I can stretch as far as I want to in order to get there. I know part of it is just making time for those dreams – the time management skills that have always eluded me to some extent, the ability to know when to stop one thing and start another without getting sucked into it, the ability to quickly and easily switch tasks from one to another that I can actually accomplish given the amount of energy and effort I have at the moment…they’re all things that take time to learn, things that take time to perfect.

Then again, they’re things that I know I have to do. I can’t just have an unmotivated day at the office and just stare at the screen for 20 minutes wishing I didn’t have to do the things that were on my plate at the office and instead desperately try to find something else to do. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I needed to shake things up in a big way, but really? I’m already doing that, so I can’t complain. Shakeups for the sake of shakeups generally don’t accomplish anything unless you take some meaning away from them. This is a lesson I’ve had reinforced several times over lately.

That being said though, I still think it’s time I thought about where my next adventure will take me. I’ll have some time off for Otakon, but I’d like to travel a bit. Whether that takes me back to New York City or maybe somewhere else I haven’t been, I haven’t decided yet. I’m open to suggestions.

I had been planning on picking up a new Macbook Pro and possibly a new iPad in the near future, but I think I’ll be careful about how I pay for those things. The Macbook Pro would easily be a tax writeoff for my writing, but the iPad is entirely a frivolous purchase – although I suppose I can write it off too if I wrote about iPad accessories more than I currently do. Ah, possibilities. Or maybe I’m just lusting after a wishlist, like anyone would.

Anyway – it’s a nice long weekend, ripe for relaxation and recuperation. I’m starting off watching Paprika, then I might move on to a few other anime and DVDs I’ve let pile up over the past couple of weeks. I still sadly admit I have a great deal of media in my collection that’s never had its shrinkwrap removed, and I’d like to do something about that.

But first, I’ll pour myself a drink.