Work-a-holic

Day 7, Thursday

5:45 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. The morning alarm is a cruel sound, shattering my head and scaring me back into the real world. I frantically raced around to get ready for work because I realized I had never printed out my notes for today's lecture. Walked Bartle and cleaned his wound, but became exasperated when he wouldn't approach his treats lying on the black plastic sheet. He just stared at me forlornly as I walked out the door. FYI, when I returned home, all three treats were still sitting on the sheet. He has truly given up trying to eat with the cone.

8:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. Arrived at work and started early. My mind was sluggish and I had developed the shakes, so I knew my body would require a nap after my presentation. Curt has been wonderful about trusting me to adjust my schedule as needed when I have these flare-ups. We had our morning meeting, where it was announced that the director has decided that at this time, they will not force everyone on the new insurance plan. The director attributed this decision to our many discussions on the subject. Yay! All that hard work was not in vane. But it does cause one problem, Curt was asked if I could be loaned to HR to help with the instructional meetings they plan to give beginning around June. It seems my continuous comments on educating the staff were heard, plus the fact that HR has not been able to explain the situation as evidenced by staff receiving three different answers to the same question, which leads to me temporarily doing work in a field I left a decade ago. The month of June is beginning to look scary as well. Delia and I are supposed to have our new orientation video scripts ready to produce in June and um, I volunteered to be the on-camera personality. SoCal is at the beginning of June and some of my FGS responsibilities begin around that time as well. Once again, baby steps.

9:00 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. Gave my Shadowed Roots lecture which covers Antebellum records for African American research. I had a small but enthusiastic group and the comments on the surveys afterwards made me feel much more comfortable with giving this talk in California. After the presentation and a brief nap, I was on desk the rest of my shift. We have a group visiting so we were really busy, which meant nothing else got done, except me switching out the two large poster stands at the front of our department while wearing a skirt. This is always interesting since I have to kneel on the ground, essentially with my but in the air, to wrestle with the signs which want to roll and the plastic sheets that cover the sign. But I did get a fun lunch with Delia, Peggy, and Kevin, who always make me laugh.

3:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Came home, walked and cleaned Bartle, cleaned up a bit as hubby comes home tomorrow, put on a load of towels, sewed a button on one of my suit jackets before deciding my body had been pushed enough. Though I wasn't shaky, I still felt sluggish and tired, so I took a nap. Hubby woke me when he called. I feel bad because the last two days, our conversations have been nil since I've been in sleep deprivation mode. Got up and wrote my blog post and worked on my final SoCal lecture.

9:30 p.m. - 11:00 p.m. Walked Bartle and cleaned the wound again. He is such a mess. The drainage has coated his hair around the eye. I have removed the cone several times to wipe down his face and neck, but I avoid around the eye area because he is still bruised, but the ointment and stuff is so oily, it looks gross. I may need hubby to hold Bartle's face while I try to clean that area this weekend. Bartle is refusing to eat with the cone at this point, so I've been hand feeding him. If he was eating his treats, I would refuse to do this, but apparently he is really scared or uncomfortable to try anymore. So I sat there, feeding him for a bit, though honestly it was still less food than normal. I am concerned that he is not taking in enough water. I see him periodically drinking, but then I'll hear the cone hit something and he's done trying. My allergies were really bothering me, so I did one of my sinus routines to try to alleviate the pressure before falling into bed for the night.