Sunday: wake up with headache, sore everything, wobbliness, and a feverish feeling (but no actual fever). Symptoms persist all day. I stay home and, brain being out of order, design an epically stupid gadget (which might just become a mass-market product), and send the board out to fab for mid-February delivery.
Monday: same symptoms, but slightly attenuated. Run a couple of necessary errands in the morning. Otherwise, mostly useless. In the evening, get a couple of tasks done on a live project for a client.
Tuesday: feeling mostly better. Spend the day in a mad rush to catch up on stuff. Figure out that the crud seems to be caffeine-related; my caffeine habit has gotten out of hand, to the tune of 70 mg/day (3/4 of a standard cup of coffee!), and my attempt to shift from diet cola to a less-corrosive energy drink with a similar dose of caffeine plus various other stimulants probably didn't help. I'm now in that nasty area where I can have a caffeine-withdrawal headache and a caffeine-overdose headache at the same time.
Wednesday: More catching up. Wake up kinda late, and skip morning walkies 'cause there's a full morning of real work to be done before I can head off to DesignCon for the afternoon.
Wednesday and Thursday afternoons: wander around the expo hall at DesignCon. It's big. I gather a moderate amount of paper, and learn of some products and services that I may be using later on. One afternoon isn't enough. Also, I meet someone who's interested in my skill set and possibly in some of my creations, so there's potential for future business. It's a good way to spend some brain-out-of-order time.
[ETA: Thursday, late morning: a city employee rings my doorbell. She'd found an opened parcel, addressed to me, in the back yard of one of the three city-owned, ex-rental houses currently scheduled for demolition*. 'Twas one that had gone missing back in December, containing industrial materials for a project that had gone into hibernation just after I ordered the stuff. Guess someone stole the little box off my porch, took it back to the park, opened it, found the contents to be two types of rubber tape rather then jewelry, and pitched it over the nearest back fence. Since the project in question may be coming back out of hibernation in a week or so, I might actually be needing the rubber tape after all.]
Friday morning: wake up kind of early, from a bizarre dream possibly brought on by DesignCon and a bacon deficiency. I'm in some unfamiliar city; not a particularly dense one, but with lots of bright lights. Seems I'm there for a trade show or something. It's Friday evening, shortly before sunset, the show (or whatever) has closed, and I'm out with The Guys. Well, with three guys I apparently met at the show, who know each other already (perhaps they're from the same company), and with whom I've been discussing business. Some others have already gone off in search of night life. As we wander through the city, the guy in the lead spots a neon sign in Hebrew and suggests: let's go to Temple! Er... we're not dressed for it? Haven't got so much as a baseball cap among us, never mind my usual Hawaiian shirt and shorts? And one of us is Irish, fer cryin' out loud!
But, no one else has a better suggestion, so in we go. And, contrary to my usual reaction to places of worship, everything makes sense, there are no graven images (to which I have a hereditary allergy), and Grandma's mitochondria are jumping up and down and telling me: Yes! This is right! We belong here! And you shouldn't be eating those bacon cheeseburgers anyway!
At this point I woke up in total panic. No! Getting religion does not fit in with my intended lifestyle!
Remainder of Friday: still having the caffeine-related lack of focus, but at least I manage to make it through the day with maybe 50 mg of the poison, so perhaps I'll be able to taper off. Have a lot of drowsy time. Breadboard what I think is a clever circuit, and discover that it really doesn't work all that well, possibly because the inductor I had handy is physically too small and saturates way too soon. Get some work done on another client project; this had been creeping up in urgency all week, but required more focus that I could manage earlier. Now the client needs to test it, and also I need to sort out what code lives where for that project (there are two repositories, and it looks like the official one is way out of date).
Tomorrow... I need to sort out another issue with the latest toaster project. I thought I'd fixed it last week, but the client reports a similar-sounding problem with the latest firmware build, so it's time break out the test setup again and see what's going on.
* Thereby decreasing the supply of single-family residences still further, and boosting property values. Yay!
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