Areas of Unrest

15 February 2004 - Like a Bicycle

How have I been like a bicycle this week? I've been too tired. (For the pun impaired, bicycles are two tired.)

Okay, I didn't say it was a good pun. It might, however, be better than this bit of doggerel that came to mind yesterday:
Roses are red
Violets are bluish
St. Valentine's Day
Is not very Jewish.

The saddest part of that is I have no idea whether or not it's original. I might have read it somewhere and gotten it stuck in those few brain cells that are still functioning after a week of major sleep deprivation.

Some of the exhaustion arose from going to storytelling on Tuesday night. It was just OK, probably because I'd had a very hectic couple of days at work and was not really up to it. I went mostly because I hadn't gone in a couple of months. And, also, I wanted to check out a new travel bookstore that's just down the block. (Alas, they did not have any Bulgaria guidebooks, but I did pick up a Venice book. I am carefully collecting names of promising gelato places.) Anyway, I got home later than I planned because I walked back to the metro with a few other people who walk slower than I do, making me just miss a train.

I was barely functional on Wednesday. Fortunately, that was a slower day. Things got worse rapidly. In short, I don't think it's a good sign when you brief the deputy director of an agency and his reaction to half your charts is "yikes!" And Friday was filled with running around to various meetings, mostly to be the general's horseholder.

This coming week looks insane, too, though at least we will be breaking out one of the bottles of champagne from our fridge on Monday to celebrate a successful launch this weekend. I think we only have to provide beer (and a rocket video) for the rest of the floor, but maybe the other programs on the floor have just been cheapskates. But we also have our first congressional staffer briefing this week, as well as prepping our senior leadership for meetings with two high mucketymucks.

So all in all, it's a good thing that it's a long weekend. I have done pretty much nothing - a few odds and ends of housework, some TV watching, some knitting, and a lot of reading. The only non-trash reading was Susan Solomon's The Coldest March, in which she argues quite convincingly that Robert Falcon Scott was immobilized by frostbitten feet, not by a blizzard. That means that Bowers and Wilson died because they chose not to abandon Scott, rather than because they were unable to make the 12 miles to the next depot. It's consistent with how the polar party dealt with Evans, but I think that makes the whole thing more tragic. Had Scott been a better man, he'd have walked off into the blizzard like Oates or, at least, taken the opium pills he made Wilson distribute.