Am I ever glad this week is over.

I think my head's about done in thinking about the Big Bad internet and the problems it can cause. As much as I love this place, I'm sort of enjoying my unintentional sabbatical from it. Not logging on much except to check email (and occasionally blog when the mood strikes.) Well, apart from at work when I have to be on. It's been nothing but trouble at work. When my server host decided to "emigrate" my account to a new server without telling it, it royally screwed up just about everything I do on a daily basis.

And I couldn't work out how to fix it. Tech support was full of wankers who talk down to me as if I don't know anything (god I hate that) and at the end of they day they were pretty much no help at all. So while being extremely frustrated for days and days, I had people at work coming at me with one problem after another (all related to this server migration) and it just seemed to pile up. Thankfully things seem to be coming together ok but it's still not 100%.

And then Wednesday it hit me hard that my mother died 6 years ago that day. And everything I do to block that out of my mind failed me. It was hard to finish out the day. See, I distract myself with anything I can. Some days I don't have to work hard at it, but on days like Wednesday I do. I surf the web, work, read, blast music, escape into some movie or TV show - anything so that I don't have to think of that horrible morning when she died. I sleep with a fan on every night so there's white noise in the room I can concentrate on when I try to go to sleep. After she died I slept with the TV on so I could just mindlessly listen to it drone on (mostly CNN) and for a while it helped me get to sleep. Then it got distracting and I switched to the fan. I've gone through 2 fans so far since then.

Anyway, technical probs at work continued to pile up and Friday my sister told me she was having soe tests done to see if she's got FLV, which is a genetic thing passed on to kids that causes blood clots. It's how mom died. So while I thought I was doing good having made it past Wednesday without too much pain, that whole conversation pretty much made things worse. See, Friday was also my dad's birthday. He would have been 60 if he hadn't died suddenly himself. It just felt like too much. I told Kelly we had to change the subject. I couldn't think about blood clots (which, quite frankly, I think about every single day. I'm afraid of them.) or mom or Dad's birthday or I'd lose it right there in the newsroom.

So I went to the bathroom to collect myself so I could get back to work. When I came out though, I passed one of my favourite reporter's desk and he, by way of just making friendly convo, asked me to tell him something to make him smile. Bad timing though. I did end up losing it a little just then and I feel like a complete idiot. But he was so very nice to me about it and strangely enough, I felt better as I walked back to my desk. He said when he gets to missing his mother, he thinks about one good memory he has of her, or he thinks about some funny thing he used to do to exasperate her. This ends up making him smile and he gets over it for a while. I thought that was really nice and the rest of the day felt better.

So the week's over and next week will be better. There's no more "anniversary" things coming up any time soon so that's good. To be honest, I really don't know why this year struck me so hard. Usually I've been able to get through them without thinking to much on it and I've been fine. Dunno what made this year different. Probably won't either.

Oh one last bit of bad news - well, bad to me anyway - after all the crap this week, another of my favourite people at the paper told me he was quitting. That really made me sad, since I'm being so open here. I'm glad he found a better opportunity elsewhere and it's probably a really good thing for him. I know how crazybusy he was at the paper and how draining that can be. But selfishly, he is one of the fun things about my job and I'm gonna miss working with him. It was really nice having a friend there who was weird and funny and shared a similar sense of humour.

But it's Saturday now and the day has been so far so good. Hanging out with the kidlet who happens to have vaca next week, which is good for me because it means I don't have to get up so early. So yay :) And I took next Friday off because I can, so yay four day week and three day weekend.

Some good news came out of this week though. My dad's getting hitched in a few months and taking off on a fantastico holiday in Europe. It's going to be so cool. Well the whole trip sounds cool but the part that I'm tickled about is that they're going to be in London for a few days at the beginning and I may be able to get them booked into my old pub/b&b. I'm hoping to anyway. When he mentioned the cost of them staying in some boring Radisson in London I mentioned my pub and I *think* the benefits of staying there may outweigh the cons for them. I hope so anyway. I'm just waiting to hear from Rory on whether he can get them in. Haven't talked to him in years though, hope he remembers me. He should, I was enough of a pain in the ass for him :)

I think it will be spiffy if my father and his lovely new bride and my sister and new step-sisters can hang out in this old veddy veddy British pub in the middle of posh Buckinghamshire (near the PM's Exchecquer estate no less.) I've been told they're all quite the Anglophiles and it seems to me that they would really enjoy the Rising Sun's atmo for the Britishness of it rather than stay in a Radisson where it would be like any other Radisson in the world. London's only a short train ride away and for that matter Oxford is just as near to the pub. Anyway I hope it works out.

And thus ends my cathartic blog post for the day :)