Friday night in NYC

Friday!!  Hurrah!!!  To say I'm pleased to see the back of this week is an understatement.  I've been lacking motivation these first few days back at the office in 2013 - happy new year by the way - it's just soooooo very hard to be there instead of laying on my parents sofa nibbling chocolates from Bon Bon while watching classic BBC drama series on TV.  At least everyone else I work with seems to feel the same way and it's not just me.  Unfortunately I do have to go into the office on Sunday to catch up on a few things, since I really haven't got as far as I'd hoped with an analysis I'm working on that's due on Tuesday.  It's partly due to my own struggle to get back into the swing of things, but a bigger reason is that I've lost some of the time I was expecting to have to focus on the analysis as I needed to work with my fellow team lead to come up a contingency plan for the department's upcoming workload after a member of her team resigned on Wednesday.  The resignation wasn't exactly unexpected, but transitioning the work across the existing team is a burden we could all do without since the team is already understaffed.  My colleague was already looking for someone to join her team but had been struggling to recruit the right person because our head of department continually vetoed perfectly good candidates who he claimed didn't have the right personality.  "I want someone who has a spark," he explained after expressing his reservations about a candidate that three of the four of us thought was perfect for the role.  Now we're in a hole and at risk of missing deadlines he's pretty much ready to offer a job to the next two candidates that walk through the door. In the meantime my colleague is having to borrow resources from my team, which means everyone is taking on additional work plus the two of us are interviewing as many candidates as we can which is taking time away from working on my client deliverables, hence the primary reason I need to go in on Sunday.  I was hoping to go in early this morning to get a head start, but I realized late yesterday that I had a 9am appointment for a teeth cleaning which put the mockers on the notion of getting to the office by 7am.

My resolution not to drink - at least mid week, let's be reasonable now - also took a hit last night as Deesha, my good friend who moved to Kansas City this summer, was in town last night and wanted to get a few people together, most of whom I haven't seen since I lost my previous job early last year.  Now much as I enjoy the company of the people who were going to be out I really wasn't in the mood for socializing last night since I'm still sort of on UK time, so I get tired pretty early at the moment, I'm exhausted from the work week and after the festive indulgences - we're big on the wine in my family - I really just needed a break, but after a lot of umming and ahhhing I coerced myself into going out and it was a fun evening, but of course I did not stick to soda water with a hint of lime, oh no, I excelled myself, I had 4 glasses of wine!!!  FOUR!!!!  Weirdly I don't feel horrible today at all, so clearly I built up a tolerance over Christmas.  "Ah whatever," I thought at the time, "it's just a one off, I'll just avoid alcohol this weekend instead", an easy enough proposition I assumed as the friend I was most likely to have made plans had to go out of town to attend the funeral of an elderly aunt, however when I got home Kim - who I surf with - had emailed to say there was a surf meetup happy hour on Friday and was I interested.  Ugh, I really wasn't, coming home after work and collapse in a heap on my sofa and eat healthy nutritious food while catching up on the shows on my DVR held massive appeal, however I like Kim a lot and since ours is a fairly recent friendship I was also keen to maintain the momentum we have going so against my better judgement I decided to accept her invitation, but I cannot tell you how happy I was when I got into work after my dental appointment and she'd emailed me to say that the surf meetup happy hour was cancelled!!  Yessssssssssss!!!

I'm going to totally sound like a grandma for saying this, but I'm so looking forward to going to bed at 9pm tonight and getting a good night's sleep before I'm up at 7am tomorrow for an early weights class.  Party on eh!!