Recovering

It has been a long three weeks. Work has been unbelievably busy as a team of four people (myself, my supervisor, and two RAs) tried to finalize a 600-page report for submission to EPA. This project (regulation of coal ash disposal from power plants) has been ongoing since before I started, which means that this draft is at least one year in the making. Despite the long time frame, numbers and methods kept changing right up until this Thursday. Even then, we received new inputs that just had to be ignored because it was too late to incorporate revised numbers in this draft. When you have nine chapters of text and 25 appendices, changing numbers is a non-trivial matter. Anyway, over the past three weeks, I worked 150 hours, including one night where I didn't leave until 10:15 and every weekend day for the past two weekends.

The report goes out today, Saturday, June 30. (Normally we don't have Saturday deadlines, but our contract expired at the end of the fiscal year, which happened to be a Saturday.) I finished my sections yesterday and was given permission to not come in today, assuming that I could be available by phone. 

And that means that today is the first day in three weeks that I didn't have to set aside time for work! I slept in until 9 am and read the news and Skyped with Colin until 11:30. Since then, I have barely moved. I did change out of my PJs and eat a sandwich, but that's it. Part of me thinks it would be nice to be out sailing or at a park reading or venturing to Trader Joe's to restock my cabinets, but I am way too tired. And since I have to be tied to my phone, sailing's not really feasible. So... lying around with a book all day it is! :)

Anyway, go team. I know that this was only a first draft, but it feels great to have such a big deadline behind me. I'm looking forward to a hopefully-less-busy next couple of weeks, but I'm so grateful that the wonderful team of people I work with made these frantic weeks as positive as possible.