is it irony if you totally saw it coming?

i am tired. not as tired as i was last night, at the end of my own personal french farce, but tired. you see, i'm supposed to be in texas right now, swilling coffee and having shallow conversations about the chinese economy with my family. but more on that later.

backing up a little, i have been, effectively, running the world at work for the last six weeks. with at least one of the two other team members out at any given time (one's two-week vacation abutting the other's four-week), i have been picking up the slack. which, at my company (where volume seems to be the watchword sometimes) translates without question to doing the work of two people. for the most part, i've been fine with this; certain developments outside of the office have kept my spirits up, and i really did rather enjoy proving just what kind of hardcore i can be capable of. but yesterday...yesterday i hit my absolute breaking point.

yesterday, you see, i found out that the other colleague on deck had been completely hobbled by the untimely death of his computer, which meant that not only was i picking up all of colleague A's work, would i mind finishing up colleague B's work as well? i know you're trying to leave by two so you can get everything done before you fly out this evening, but you can get it all finished and to the vendor today, right?

what this ultimately translates to: i have five major projects that need to be addressed before i leave the office today. Five. ordinarily, this would not be a problem. i am well-versed in the spectacular game of hurry up and wait that we get on a daily basis, and am usually able to budget my time accordingly; but, when staring down a truncated work day, few things are more chilling than getting your first round of edits just before noon.

but, that's the way the sticks fall sometimes. i somehow managed to tap into the speed force and get everything done (with time to go have lunch with stuart, wherein i did nothing but panic in his general direction), albeit by moving my departure time back by about two hours. however. eventually, the golden moment arrived, and i made my way to laguardia to venture out towards the wild wild west, arriving harried, disheveled and in a foul, exhausted temper.

only to find out that owing to inclement weather, my flight was canceled.

apparently, it's tornado season, and not only were there no flights out until morning, but nothing had landed in dallas since 11 that morning--dfw had been in some sort of lockdown.

after that revelation, there just seemed no point to giving this day a single other inch with which to gag me. i turned around, went home, and went straight to bed.

we try again today. at least i'm already packed.