hrj

During this festive, joyful month, I regularly find myself slipping into bah-humbug mode simply because there's so much darn work involved in having fun. Must prioritize. Must prioritize. I'm flying out on Saturday. The xmas shopping is all done. (Well, except for an item or two that don't need to have until 12th night, but since I have essentially no shopping days between flying back and 12th night, this is not much leeway.) Between now and then I must do extensive laundry, do the month's finances, pack, do the xmas cards, and ... well, ok, that's the absolute minimum. (And, were I being honest, the xmas cards are technically optional, but I'd rather not consider them so.) You wouldn't think this would be a great deal to get done in 5 evenings, and yet I'm feeling schedule-oppressed.

At least my project at work looks to get completed before the end of the week. This isn't the current Major Investigation project, but the "personal development" project that involves adapting and converting an Access database designed for a different department into something my department can use for tracking and trending investigations. By the end of today I had finished designing the Excel workbook that converts and formats the new data for importation, modified all the file addresses and references in the Access macros, modified the macros for the departmental differences, tentatively identified the aspects of the program that are harmlessly redundant or irrelevant, and cleared out and manually re-loaded the "historic" data that the program updates. By 5:30 I'd gotten to the point of running an actual test-update with the new version of the database. When the first test turned up a fatal flaw, I had the good sense to shut the computer down and go home. Debugging is better done in the morning than the end of the day. (And I have a good notion of the clumsy work-around that will solve the problem. The elegant version can, if necessary, wait for after vacation.) The really tedious part of the conversion will be going through dozens of query-tables and reports to figure out how many of them are actually likely to be useful and how many were one-off solutions to particular questions that nobody in my department will ever need to ask.

What I really want to do is go to bed early. But instead I need to start the laundry and reconcile the checking statements.