ghost in the glass

This, in case you're wondering, is my job. (Also the reason I came in at 6:30am when I was scheduled to come in at 10am, and oh geeze I'd kind of like to not make a habit of doing 12.5 hour days...) BUT! Out of all the pain and misery (and the blisters on my fingertips from wielding a box cutter knife for hours) comes this:

( Llama, llama, llama, goat! )

Edit - the entire menagerie is currently decorating my boss' boss' office, which we stealth attacked while she was out at lunch. We're waiting for the reaction when she gets back (and in the meantime I guess if the rightful client comes down and asks where their llamas and goats are I'm supposed to tell them that they're being used in a practical joke...)

12 hours of work yesterday.

5-ish hours of really intermittent broken up sleep.

Currently on hour 7 of today's work day, have only just remembered that perhaps I should make myself eat something, and have so far done 3 (rather nice if I do say so myself) impromptu design jobs and attended a printing consultation meeting in lieu of my boss.

[wry] None of which, you may note, is included in my job description. =P

I am currently in that state of fatigue where I should not be operating heavy machinery. I keep losing little bits of time every time I close my eyes (very SPN special effect stop/start/flash sort of sensation) and there's occasionally bright strobe lights (like cop car flashers) blinking in the corner of my vision. The world is moving while I'm (attempting) to stand still. I'm continuing to keep myself moving mostly via momentum.

I have some sort of vague hope that a bowl of chili might improve this scenario. x_x

The Bad:

1) My shoulder, the one that went pop the other week. It's nothing awfully BAD - there's nothing broken, nothing torn, nothing too terribly traumatized, it's just muscles being complete bitches in that way muscles do and taking forever to get over themselves in that way they do. So while my back/shoulder blade area has finally stopped with the complaining, my shoulder is now taking up the slack. And now that I know that it's muscles I'm AWARE of it and can actually trace it if I sit still for a bit - the muscles over the back of my shoulder are a freaking mess of uber tight knots. So to compensate for that the muscles in my upper shoulder and arm are picking up the slack and doing more than their fair share (and this isn't just lifting, it's things like "gravity pulling on your swinging arm as you walk") so that the actual pain has now migrated into the ball of my shoulder and is radiating down my bicep to my elbow.

At the moment? It feels remarkably like someone has taken a sharpened screwdriver, jammed it into the joint of my shoulder, and is twisting. Though admittedly it's better now than it was before I took the advil (there's one or two positions I can sit in now that dull it down to ignorable levels of ow).

2) I am maintaining at a level of tired (overwork + deadline stress + fubar-ed sleep schedule, lack of quality sleep, & caffeine dependency FTW) which is very like alcohol intoxication. Only without any of the fun and with a constant low grade hangover. Also, it 100% cancels out my appetite. You can ask my roomie - reminding myself to eat nowadays is a freaking CHORE.

3) Just got a collection call for a surgery related bill. We won't discuss this. No, really, we won't. It's paid, it's taken care of. I forgot how much I *loathe* collectors, I haven't had to talk to one in years. I am not pleased by it now, but they sent me so many "this is not a bill" followed by "but these ARE bills" after the gallbladder incident that I'm not surprised something slipped through the cracks. (To the lady's credit, despite having to rattle off her pre-scripted spiel, she was quite nice.)

The Good:

1) I just flopped an F grade to an A because I am THAT damned awesome. Go me.

2) I also just rescued our collective department asses at work after one job (that was sent to us last thursday) apparently got dropped through the cracks. Ooops. Classic case of everybody thinking somebody else was working on it. Fortunately it's one of our more laid back clients and I told him (truthfully) that we're waiting on a supply that we don't have, and maybe he'd like to switch to this other thing over here, yes/yes? Client agreed, client is happy, job will be delivered tomorrow, go me.

...I can't think of a third. Bugger. Guess that leaves me 3 to 2 in the blah. v_v

PS - you're all making me very happy with the poll. ^__^ Please feel free to keep clicking off ticky boxes. My problem is that *IS* my whittled down list of pictures to work from - I already culled out any I didn't like. So yeah - majority vote rules! woo hoo!