Shortly Busy

Short holiday weeks sound good in theory. The part with the extra days off from work is great. The best. Cause for a quickening of the pulse with anticipation, really. The part where five days work is jammed into three days is much less great. Pulse-poundingly stressful, actually.

My Thanksgiving holiday short work week opens Monday at 7:45 a.m. with a full day video shoot, which didn’t seem like a big deal when it was scheduled by the art director, but the previous Friday night at 7, when the scripts were still not finalized or approved, it was feeling like a crushingly huge ordeal (the kind involving chest pain and a sudden desire to take up heavy drinking) to the peon trying to get it all done (me). Some of the speakers scheduled for the video added some great ideas when they reviewed their scripts, but the problem is, by inserting their company’s name an extra three or four times and constantly exchanging longer words and phrases like “accomplishments” in place of “results” and “a result of” for “due to,” they also added time to my carefully crafted, appropriately timed passages. Scripts targeted for 20 to 25 seconds were suddenly running 37 to 40 seconds, even with my fast-paced New England read, which can be twice as fast as the measured pace many people speak around here.

Do the math – five or six or eight scripts lengthened by 10 to 15 seconds each by the speakers (who are likely thinking, “it’s only a few words/seconds…”) and suddenly the five minute video is an over-budget six minute video.

Tuesday is slated to start with a dentist appointment (7:50 a.m.) and wrap up with a home energy evaluation at 3:00 and somehow an eight hour workday squeezed in there to prepare for Wednesday’s schedule – a working session with the staff of a client company to finalize the content of their web site. It’s painfully obvious that Tuesday’s life maintenance appointments need to be postponed to a week with a full five day work schedule – I can’t justify missing three hours of work for what suddenly feels like frivolity when I have project deadlines looming. Once again, the time-space continuum is not my friend, I need a double, I need more time.

Wednesday at 5:00 and hopefully earlier, my workweek ends and the holiday kicks in with a drive to Virginia for Thanksgiving with Boyfriend’s family. I like car travel with Boyfriend, we like the same music and we have some very interesting conversation in the car. And I haven’t spent much time in Virginia – if anything, it’s been a pass-through state on the way to somewhere else, with the notable exceptions of the 2001 Denbigh High Graduation (Newport News) and about an hour at Virginia Tech depositing an incoming freshman for fall semester, 2001. I’m looking forward to the trip, which fulfills multiple objectives for me, including a change of scenery, quality time with Boyfriend and meeting more of his family. It’ll be a short visit, but it will be fun. How could it not be? His mom and sister like Scrabble!