"This is a good life," I whisper to myself. I'm not certain I always believe it, but tonight I think I do.

Stephen's DCTV shoot was today; I got up this morning and headed cross-town with Jeff for a taping of scenes for a live-action version of 'Code Monkey.' I tired rapidly in the latter half of the shoot, and was grateful when Stephen rearranged the shoot order to get the backing band (read: Jeff, among others) finished up.

Dinner was at 5:30 at Stephen and Misty's. We didn't get home until a little after four, and I suspected I was making an imprudent choice when I lay down for a nap, but I did it anyway.

I woke up nearly five hours later, and was grateful to learn that jeff had brought back some of Misty's soup for me. I ate it on the couch while re-watching a favorite TV episode with Jeff. We talked, absently, of our upcoming trip to Seattle. Of food. Of life in general.

Jeff went to bed hours ago, and I settled in with a book. Books are accessorized with felines in this household; Tenzing and Edmund both are attracted to the stillness and quietness they engender in 'their' humans. As a result, I've been pinned here for a few hours, turning pages amidst kitty bathing sessions that subsided, eventually, into the amusing, soft sounds of kitty snoring.

I'll sleep again soon. Probably within the hour. While I'm awake, and have barrelled my way through a great deal of Kushiel's Mercy tonight, the tiredness is still there. I feel it in the set of my shoulders and how my fingers seem to always rub my eyes a little harder than is absolutely necessary.

When we don't rest enough, mentally or physically, we can subsist on our reserves for a while. What is true of reservoirs is true of people; draw down more deeply than you replenish, and eventually you run dry.

I think perhaps I have played my game a little too close. Early this year I calculated what it would take for me to be able to do the two major trips we wanted to take this year. My workplace only allowed us to carry 120 hours of vacation time at once. I wrote out a spreadsheet and calculated exactly what I would need to make these trips work, and the answer was clear: no vacation time between January and July. None. The reward would be two extraordinary trips in one year: over a week each in Seattle and Hawaii.

I fly in about forty days; forty, the Old Testament way of saying "How long? We don't know exactly how long, but it was a while."

It is a good life. I am tired, and I am drawing hard on my reserves, but it is still a good life, and soon? Soon, there will be water, mountains, city, and sky. I will stare into the campfire I share with friends and it will have been worth it. Every moment.

For now, though, life is what it is.

The jokes become less comfortable when you realize that you're spending more hours per day with your co-workers than you do with the person you married. Co-workers don't have the same commitment to permanence that spouses do; they are people you spend time with, but not people you share everything with. I marvel at how few people find this strange or unusual.

A co-worker of mine died this past week after an extended illness. I did not know her as well as many of my co-workers did, but I was greatly saddened by her death. I enjoyed her company, though our social circles did not overlap. She was well-liked, and with reason. She was both pragmatic and knowledgeable, and -- important for someone in my line of work -- embraced computers and technology to a level that was not often seen in the books-and-paper world of libraries.

We had warning, of course; the quiet step of co-workers passing news down the hall told us that she had been worsening fast, but no endpoint or timeline was given us. I assumed days, not hours, but I was wrong. Another quiet step, another knock on the door, later that afternoon passed the news to our department.

I ached to see my co-workers cry, those people that I spent more time with on a daily basis than my spouse, but whom I didn't feel I had permission to hug. Later that afternoon, I was approached by other co-workers who asked, "Would you mind designing the memorial flyers?"

I did not cry then, not to the level of my co-workers, but the tears came when I slotted her photo into the layout. The combination of personal distress and professional graphic design was too dichotomous for my brain to handle well, and it unsettled me greatly when each step of the design approval process brought fresh tears from my co-workers. Someone had to approach the project with a professional, not a personal, eye, and evidently that someone needed to be me.

If you like the people you work with, the line between professional and personal can blur all too quickly.

I got word late last week that the funeral would be Monday, and harbored plans to attend the services between taking the last remaining visiting friends to the airport. As the weekend went on, I realized that my plans were plausible but perhaps not well thought out; by attending the funeral I would miss out on the last few hours of visiting with two people who had flown from South Carolina and Arizona to stay with us.

On Sunday night, I made up my mind to skip the funeral. I should have attended, but I also should have spent time with my houseguest-friends; given no good option, I chose to side with the living. I thought about her as we had lunch and bought coffee and gradually talked faster, trying to fit in months' worth of conversations in the half-hour left before airport time.

I thought about how the professional and personal worlds collide, whether we want them to or not. I put Jake and Scott on planes and thought of Helen, and wished them all well.

All three mattered, but choices had to be made.

He's missed me, the little brat. Tenzing too. I've been a null entity in my life for the past two weeks as I worked on bringing The Print Project™ to completion. I came home Thursday night with a sense of jubilance that was tempered by a well-chilled bottle of Mirror Pond Pale Ale and a desperate need to sleep. I slept nearly ten hours that night and nearly twelve last night. I feel mostly human again.

Frantic creativity, for me, comes with a hefty price tag. I do marvel at how I react to it, as I'm not sure if my reaction is typical. It is not physically tiring work, but it's mentally draining. I measure the length of my days by the lights in the room I work in; if I'm the person who first turns them on at the beginning of the day and also turns them out when I leave, I know it's been a long day.

(Misty, I have meant to ask you for ages if you react similarly to design work.)

I think my co-workers think I'm a little crazy. 'Touched' is the phrase I heard growing up, as in, She's a little touched in the head, isn't she? I'm something of a favored and eccentric pet in the office, someone whose foibles are odd, yet amusing. My creative output can be reasonably estimated by a graph containing hours of headphone time and total cups of tea per day.

It also turns out that I'm slightly superstitious about projects. I react strangely when told an unfinished project is good. Perhaps I'm afraid of jinxing the final piece of the puzzle. However, once the project is done, and I can see all the parts, I'm comfortable with being told it's good work.

But, regardless, it is done. I had a slight whiff of disappointment when I handed a copy of the finished project to Jeff this afternoon, so he could see what had stolen his wife away for two weeks. I stifled the sense of discouragement that said, "But it's only three pieces of paper. How did this eat 116 hours of my life?" But that's easily answered; see the title of this entry.

116 hours goes away quickly when you add it all together: Photography. Initial design and layout. Throwing out most of the initial design and layout when the mailing's layout had to be changed radically due to cost issues. Reshoots. Photo cleanup. Copywriting (in this case turning raw statistics into readable, interesting chunks of information). Layout. More layout. Proofing. Discussing changes with printer and the commissioner of the project. Readying for press, and sending it away.

116 hours, mostly over the course of two weeks, one of which was shortened due to a holiday.

No wonder the cats have missed me. I woke up this morning to soft, querulous purring from Tenzing: snuggle time plz? Since words don't work well with cats, I rubbed his ears, giving the Universal Cat Signal Of Human Available For Petting. The next thing I knew, he was busily twirling himself into the perfect position to collapse in the crook of my arm, chin draped over my elbow, paws flexing as he uttered a dramatic, exhausted wheeze (he is such the drama queen) and settled into a nap. I could feel the soft vibrations against my arm as he purred himself to sleep. I hadn't made time for him, and he'd missed me.

Today is a recharge day. Tea, sunshine, kitties. The best moment of all? Realizing that I'd guessed wrong on some of the details (Huntsville? Married? House instead of apartment?) but that when examined from a distance, I've become exactly the adult I thought I would be.

This won't be the last time I need a recovery day like this one. The nature of my job guarantees there will be others, and sooner rather than later, but it's comforting to realize that this time, I didn't just do a decent job, I did a jaw-dropping kick-ass one. Each time I do so, I grow a little more confident that I can do it again.

But for now? Edmund's belly needs rubbing, and I've got a little paperback that's whispering my name.