Intensity rising

I can’t sleep. That’s probably a good thing because when I walked downstairs at 2:30 AM to get a glass of water, I found the front door of our house wide open—locked, but open, swaying in the wind of the hurricane… err, tropical storm… err, tropical depression. It must not have latched and we didn’t realize. It’s times like these I’m glad we live in a somewhat suburban-looking neighborhood.

For those of you who don’t know, R is still at home. She was supposed to leave after work for Minnesota (another wedding), but the weather was responsible for a delay that would have caused her to miss her connecting flight, so she's grounded and rescheduled to leave at 7:30 this morning, which means for an early morning trip to the airport. I should be in a good condition to drive her there as long as I don’t try to go back to sleep until I return.

I’m blaming my current state of insomnia on the stress of my new job. I can’t get into too many details about it here, but it has been quite an intense week. I worked extra hours every night. The one night I had something else planned (the Sneaky Peek on Wednesday), I had to come home afterwards and put another three hours in. This is the kind of job that can take over a person’s life. I don’t want that to happen, especially not this weekend. I’ve got a to-do list a mile long for this weekend (no, it’s not the list from four entries ago), and a few of the items do involve relaxing. For instance, I just added “take a nap” to the schedule for today. I feel like I can’t quite relax until I have all of my job-related work finished off. My boss did give me an assignment for the weekend, so I have that hanging over my head. I should log on right now and get it out of the way, but I don’t want my coworkers seeing my ID next to any early morning timestamps and thinking I’m some kind of crazy workaholic. So I’ll use this time to get caught up on my web surfing instead.

I love my wife and spending an extra night with her this weekend was wonderful (we went out for Mexican food after the attempt at the airport), but I’m really looking forward to having the rest of the weekend to myself. I’m still planning to shoot one of my viral videos, but I pushed it back to Sunday because I need more time to prepare. If all goes well though, I should have a rough cut edited by the end of the long weekend. Yes, that’s right—I said long weekend. My new company, unlike my last one, actually recognizes holidays. I worked the last two Labor Days in Mobile because I chose to save my earned time off for other vacations. Now I don’t have the choice. Well, I take it back—there’s work to do if I want it. I’ll do the one assignment my boss gave me at some point this weekend, but then I’m closing my work laptop and hopefully keeping it closed.

One last thing, a plead to Ernesto: you're a big, scary storm and all, but I'm begging you please don't make the power go out for any extended period of time this weekend. I'm going to be needing electricity.