Skipped a day

I missed yesterday because there was a goodbye dinner for our Inspector, who is moving on to different pastures. I'd forgotten about the dinner but was reminded by one of the corporals just as work ended.

I'm not usually much for office functions, especially when I don't know a lot of the people. I always seem to end up standing awkwardly to the side, trying not to eat all the hors d'oeuvres in a fruitless attempt to a) keep my hands busy and b) not look like I'm just standing awkwardly in a corner. :P

I am fortunate enough at my new job to be surrounded by a bunch of very good eggs. They're all friendly and most know me by name (though I don't know all their names yet, which makes me feel very very bad), and I get along well with all of them. We ended up at Moxie's, which I'd never been to before. It's as if La Cage Aux Sports had an affair with Hooters and then sent the child off to boarding school. A high-end sports bar in which the waitresses wore dresses that were so short I was amazed they could move at all. They were all very very conventionally pretty, too, including our waitress, who had stunningly gorgeous eyes.

So all my coworkers had a few drinks, and I had a Caesar. First alcohol I've had in... six months? I think. Something like that. It was nice. One coworker got herself tipsy on three glasses of wine and was a riot for the rest of the evening. She's already a little rowdy and has a mouth on her like a dockworker, and so watching her let loose was one of the evening's highlights. Our end of the very long table basically got very wound up, and we spent most of the evening laughing like loons and poking fun at each other.

It was fun, but I came back entirely exhausted after 12 hours of working a very busy shift on my own and then several hours of socialising with people I don't really know. Yes, I know, the latter part totally sounds horrible, but as a major introvert I find interacting even with people I know well quite draining. So I dropped into bed and lapsed into a coma until this morning.

I awoke at 3:50, because that's when I usually get up for my day shifts, but since I was working a night shift today I rolled over and went back to sleep. I forced myself to go back to sleep three more times, because I tend not to have naps in the afternoon before work, and I didn't relish the prospect of being up for over 24 hours if I could help it.

So here we are, and it's nearly time for me to go to work again. I live an exciting life, as you can see.

I'm hoping to get some writing done at some point over the weekend. I hate not having the time or the energy to write these days. It's kind of killing me a little. I have to learn to kick myself in the ass and write whenever I have ten minutes here and there. Before, my writing always happened in bursts of at least two hours, sometimes more, when I could sit down and simply write uninterrupted. My life doesn't lend itself to that anymore, so the logical answer is to change myself, since I can't change my circumstances. So far I find I've been unable to adapt my brain's wiring to write in tiny bursts whenever I can catch a moment to myself. I just can't get into the right (write?) mindset fast enough, and by the time I have a rhythm going, it's time to stop again. So now my brain has rebelled and refuses to produce any words whenever I'm in front of my computer/notebook, as if it knows I'm going to have to stop and therefore feels there's no point in even trying. That means no writing at all, which is making me kind of unhappy.

So, I just need to figure out how to change my methods. It has to be doable, I just haven't worked out how.