Today I feel mildly awake.
It’s been quite a long week. Shore Leave over the weekend, inventory prep at the store–convention, lengthy drive, twelve-plus hour days at work. Suffice to say yesterday I was exhausted and unable to move, and not just from the seventeen hour shift I pulled on Wednesday due to performing the inventory. Things build.
Shore Leave, which I’ve written a little bit about, deserves a few more words. No, I didn’t attend the “Antitranshumanist” panel–I decided to run across the street to the Hunt Valley Mall and grab some dinner before the Pocket Books upfronts. No, I didn’t attend the Masquerade–I’d hit the wall Saturday afternoon, decided a nap was the better part of valor, and passed out for longer than I’d intended. No, I didn’t ask the “drive-by” question in the “Has Trek fiction gone too far panel”–in the end, I didn’t really need to. I did, however, get to moderate a panel on Sunday–“The Future of Trek–Author’s Panel”–for reasons that still escape me, and things actually worked out quite well; we had an interesting dialogue between panelists and the large audience.
Did I have fun at Shore Leave? Absolutely. It’s always great to see friends I see all too infrequently, and a few days away from work was gratifying. I had enjoyable breakfasts with Geoff Trowbridge, Jim McCain, Lawrence Schoen (on Saturday), and Marc Klein (on Sunday) at the hotel’s breakfast buffet–the omlettes there are fab. I had the opportunity to speak with several people about my story in Constellations, due out in about six weeks, and I’m quite curious about the reaction it will generate. I got to meet an author whose work I’ve always been thrilled by, Margaret Wander Bonanno, and several books autographed by her. I bought some Doctor Who fanzines for my collection. All in all, it was a great weekend, a too-short weekend, and next July cannot come soon enough.
As I said earlier in the week, I left halfway through Sunday’s programming. Friday’s trip up was long, and I had no desire to get back to Raleigh in the early hours of the morning and then have to work a long day at work on Monday. Traffic was light, I was back to Raleigh by nine, and I had a decent sleep.
This week my store had its first inventory since April, 2005, and it needed preparation with inventory stickers laid and older stickers checked. The actual preparation went smoothly, though business was quite strong this week and that kept diverting me from organizing product and laying stickers, but it also necessitated long working days. By the time I left work early Thursday morning, the inventory completed, I totalled up my work hours for the week–I’d already passed forty.
No wonder I felt like I’d gone five rounds in the ring with a Viking berserker. No wonder I spent yesterday somewhere between awake and asleep, even when walking and upright.
Going into the weekend, things should return to their usual status quo. Whew. 🙂