Okay, this is totally a rant, so ignore it if you’re not into that sort of thing. I’m struggling to get into my story, and I’m going to blame life. This week started out as something of a panic attack. I had Monday off, but still had phone calls from work (This is generally okay, I’d rather have the discussion on sampling difficulties real-time than weeks later when nothing can be done about it.) Then, on Tuesday, I spent most of the day memorizing four slides of a presentation I’ve already given, along with a good 40 pages of supporting material. (I love the State’s public process. It makes me feel good about the state we live in – everyone can have a say in regulation, but when you work for the state, it can sometimes feel outrageously onerous to prepare for a presentation for a proposal that could very well be DoA.) Sometime during this memorization process, I got an e-mail asking to submit an abstract for the ‘little triple-a’s’ (This is cool and all, I mean getting to stand in front of folks and say: I help to manage the largest data-set of subsistence information in the world and now I’ve got a super-shiny way for you to look at our data, is super-neat. I mean, what I’ve got to present becomes a bit of an ego-trip.) sort of no-problem (I cheated and submitted the same abstract I used for a presentation at a climate change conference in November), except that I’ve already got 4 30-page survey instruments to finalize, and finish the database redesign project I’ve been promising for the better part of six months, and also the one major analysis project I didn’t delegate is four months behind schedule. At the end of the workday, with all this on my mind, I keep opening the file containing the first 12 pages of chapter 11, scanning to the end, and staring blankly at the last paragraph. I KNOW what needs to go there, I can see it, it’s not long, or even difficult to write, yet I can’t get there. I’m just too distracted by work!

Ahhh -now that’s off my chest, I’ve got an hour before bed. I think I’m going to close wordpress, pour a nip of the cheapest whiskey I have in the house, and stare at that chapter for a while.