Lovely biking to the post office today, where I dropped off a couple packages. I'm reminded why it's so nice to stay put during extended national holidays, because you get to enjoy the city without its usual frenzy of angry traffic. I learned this as a young boy after spending many a national holiday doing things that would never at all occur to me to do had I not been pressured into it by family and society at large. When I was finally old enough to make my own decisions about how to spend my days, I jumped at the chance to not do what everyone else did, and instead spent that holiday time doing what I genuinely enjoyed doing.
I don't quite get that kind of luxury now, as there is an awful lot of work on my plate. But it is the kind of work I enjoy, so there is that. Actually, I lie, it isn't. It certainly could've been the kind of work I enjoy, but a couple of these projects involve other parties who are nitpicky and “micromanagerial” in a way I haven't experienced in the 18+ years I've doing this kind of work. Perhaps I've grown too accustomed to being asked to just do my own thing with little to no interference from anyone. It is for this reason that I'm typically extra careful about assessing how much of a control freak the people who approach me are before taking on any gigs, but it seems my assessment powers are waning. And now I pay the price by having very little will to live and in fact wishing I was off doing some redundant holiday nonsense in some godforsaken frost town that was never intended for human habitation to begin with.
Part of the frustration I suppose stems from one's inability to assess a project's production timeline. If say, you anticipate a project might be done in X amount of time, that can easily be botched by the interference of another party who can result in it taking 10X the amount of time, and thus affecting other projects you might have on the docket. Like, say, THE SOLAR GRID for example, which of course I am terribly behind on and will be immensely depressed if I don't get Ch.7/#8 out the door before year's end. Which is uh, soon, way too soon.