In case you haven't heard, I'm being sent to Germany.

It's been well over a month since I last posted an entry. Not only does this break all my previous records, but it is also the result of something rather different than my typical motivations. Most of the time, I avoid writing journal entries out of a sense that I'm bothering people with what amounts to petty bullshit. That's just a justification for my own self-loathing, self-denying behavior. My recent silence, however, resulted due to more mundane circumstances.

Throughout February, I was working in Portland, OR at a difficult assignment. It was three weeks worth of 12 hour days and hair-pulling. I had only began to recover from being terribly sick. I had also just moved 30 minutes closer to Minneapolis, putting me well within city limits. Pazi had just moved in with me on the very day my pay was cut. It was an exhausting, blurry period that I hope to not soon repeat.

Once I returned in early March, I had another highly critical task. For years we needed a class for one of our most complex monitoring products. A product on which I had spent the last year becoming an expert. I had thrown myself into the writing just before I became sick in early January. Now I only had a few scant weeks to compose all the slides and note pages and turn it into a real class. With the help of a coworker, we managed to create a 860 page monstrosity of exercises and configuration methods.

For a time, there was a concern I wouldn't be able to teach the class. All this time, my Portland client was trying to build a new production environment with updated hardware. This is a challenge no matter how small the environment. My return to Portland was pushed back and back until I could teach the class, with another week to fix the bugs.

Last week I flew back out again. Tuesday, I flew back. I think you can guess what happened.

All of this left me exhausted. I abused caffeine throughout all of this just to keep myself going. I'm now paying for that addiction. I'm terrified that without it, I wouldn't be able to think, wouldn't be able to work. I'm terrified that I'd be useless without it. I'm working on that too, but it's a slow and difficult process. Work certainly isn't helping either.

Today I found myself in a meeting discussing an assignment in Germany. I've only been outside the country once, during my visit to the UK in 2007. I spent the remainder of the day being frightened at the possibilities. I'm not out at work, and I hope to keep it that way. When I got home, I hoped to let the fear and stress slowly burn off. Instead, I retreated back into my room to let it burn itself out.

The emotional outburst always leaves me sleepy. I woke up to Pazi making curry for dinner and a night of movie watching.