Vacation

I have been enjoying my vacation a lot. The past semester left me feeling profoundly burned out. My job has grown to the point where I can't really do it anymore. Instead, I'm constantly satisficing the competing demands, and putting off the difficult and intractable problems. The result is that, instead of healthy structured procrastination, I've started to feel paralyzed, because every time I try to fix something, I find other things not-quite-right (because I didn't have time to do them right in the first place) and end up increasingly hedged in by the hard stuff I've been putting off for a lack of time to address it properly. It's very unsatisfactory. The next few weeks are going to be particularly bad: I have to resolve some sticky problems to migrate BCRC webservices from old hardware to new hardware, and then set up everything for the spring semester. Next week, I'll have to go in and face this. But this week, I've put it mostly out of my mind to do other things.

The only real "work" I've been doing is Esperanto writing. I have one piece out, a piece accepted, a piece submitted, and several more partly done. If I push myself, I'm hopeful to have at least a couple more done before I have to go back to work. But then it will be a long dry spell before I'm likely to have any energy to work on Esperanto stuff again.