Spin me right round

I am having a serious motivation problem. I have a large freelance piece due Monday. I've done all the reporting -- I have pages and pages of notes, many of which are irrelevant to my story. I can't quite figure out exactly what the story is about, though, and so I am sitting here paying bills, browsing through some blogs, listening to the dishwasher cycle and pointedly not even opening the Word file that contains my notes.

Darren is still in Boston; he stayed last night to hang out with his brother, who flew up from Tampa just to see the Sox game. They're tooling around town today, and D. will take the bus home this afternoon. I've been cranky and irritable with him on the phone, in part I think because I have spent so much time working in the last 10 days -- and absolutely no fun time with him -- that it's about all I have to talk about.

Since I left for Detroit a week ago Thursday, it's been an utter whirlwind. I returned Sunday after three jam-packed days, including sessions all day Saturday. Then, from Monday to Friday, the earliest I arrived home in the evening was 8. I have essentially fed the dogs, checked e-mail and fallen into bed each night. (Short digression: I'm really wishing I could stay awake and read longer; I'm about halfway through The Known World, which is excellent... which you might have guessed from the glowing reviews and the Pulitzer it received. It's complex, though, so I have to backtrack a bit every night to remember what's going on.)

And that's part of the reason I'm having such trouble getting down to work today. I've got this freelance magazine story to write, plus a story for my own paper to finish, plus at least one more to edit. And that does not a fun weekend make. If I can get the mag story done before D. gets home, though, it would be a major accomplishment. And then I might be able to stop sniping at him and actually enjoy his presence.

Yep, I'm opening that Word document now, just as soon as I look up the link for that book I mentioned...

Update on my idiocy: I am working from two versions of notes -- one document from home, one from work. They began as the same document, so they have the same name. You know where this is going, don't you? I opened the work version I'd e-mailed myself and promptly saved over the home version... forgetting, of course, that the home version was the only place I'd saved the notes from the 45-minute-long interview I did with a bold, outspoken (read: very quotable) woman. What's even better is that the first time I tried to write this addendum, I accidentally deleted the whole damn thing. This does not bode well for the rest of my afternoon.