I should have said no

Some days I worry that AI will steal my job and other days I reckon it’s welcome to it.

There has been a welcome-to-it vibe to this week and it’s only Wednesday morning.

You know that little gauge on the front of the vacuum cleaner that shows how full the dust bag is? Well, my brain and body are approaching the red zone.

I have officially taken on too much and simultaneously realised I am getting too old for the pace.

I am accustomed to being super busy, but lately I am writing like a dervish.

Drinks Digest has been commissioned to deliver a major project that, in hindsight, was too big to be feasible for a person who is already overcommitted.

I should have said no, but I said yes and now I am drowning in panic and word counts and rapidly approaching deadlines.

It coincides with the word counts being too big in my day job.

Someone asked me to help them fix a report on Monday afternoon after a day of last-minute emergency requests and I went down a two-hour rabbit hole of getting it into shape. When I emerged I felt like I had been hit by a truck carrying dictionaries, but I still had a few more hours of writing to do.

I hit the ground running and madly typing first thing on Tuesday morning, then flung myself in a cab for an external meeting. When I arrived at the designated cafe my contact wasn’t there. I checked my phone and found a missed message from an hour and a half earlier asking if we were still meeting in person or virtually.

Call me crazy, but I thought an appointment someone else had made in my diary that I had accepted, which included a specific location was a clear indication of our intentions.

As I trekked a few blocks up to their office to meet them there instead, exhausted tears pricked in my eyes.

We met in the coffee shop below their office and all I wanted was a piece of toast because my stomach is still a bit dodgy, but the cafe was only serving cheese toasties and not toast. Do not ask me why, I was too tired to get to the bizarre bottom of it.

So I sighed and ate my cheese toastie and tried to fight off the weariness enveloping me.

Last night the roadworks returned. The concrete saws got another workout and three diggers excavated the nature strips. Five hundred million lights flashed.

As I tossed in bed battling the noise, hot flushes and a sore hip, I imagined being somewhere quiet and peaceful where there was no writing, just relaxing.

That is a long way off, as my project deadline is mid-August.

In the meantime there will be very few spare moments for anything other than the project, my day job and disrupted sleep patterns.

Apologies to anyone I neglect in the process.

Song of the day: Bjork “It’s oh so quiet”