Night shift is nearly over

I've reached the point in my night shifts where I hate pretty much everything and everyone. It usually happens after midnight on my second night shift, but this time around it actually only struck on the third night a couple of hours ago. Now I only have an hour and a half or so before I can go home, so it's not so bad.
 
I've been procrastinating on my term paper, which is due... I was going to say tomorrow, but I guess technically it's today. It's 1/3 done, but I still have the other two parts to write. The first part was the group work component, but I did about 90% of that anyway, so it feels as though I worked on it alone most of the time. It reminded me of why I hate group work. :P I need to sleep when I get home, but the plan is to get up early-ish and finish writing it after that. It's not due until midnight, and I only need to write 4-6 pages, which is eminently doable. I am trying to be better about the procrastination, and I *was* doing a little better, right up until this final paper was due.

I will have to work harder on that next semester, because the further I get into this new degree, the more complex and difficult my coursework is going to get, and I won't be able to get away with last-minute work like this anymore. Not to mention that I work 60-hour weeks, so with school on top of that (plus I'm still streaming on Twitch as a hobby, which takes up another 12-15 hours a week), time is a scarce commodity these days.

I don't have a huge amount to report right now, mostly because I am so tired my eyes are crossing. I am compiling a list of, well, I guess New Year's Resolutions is not a misnomer in this case, although I like to think of them more as goals, because resolutions tend to go by the wayside starting in February. In this case, I'm trying to make my goals as specific as possible, so that I'll have as good a chance as any to make them happen. So I will probably write up an entry with those goals later on, sometime this week, but not until my paper is finished.

Honestly, I will probably have to talk with my therapist about all of this, because she is pretty good at helping me come up with strategies for not crashing and burning. Okay, time to start doing end-of-shift things. I've posted twice in the past three days, so I am moderately optimistic about my odds of keeping on with the posting. Onward!

Done!

 Woo, I have finished and submitted my last term paper! Now all I have to do is wait for my grades. Oh, and pay my tuition for next semester (which, ouch, tuition is way more expensive than it was when I last went to university, let me tell you: I am paying more for two courses than I used to pay for a full semester during my first degree). Anyway, I am 90% sure I passed. I've been getting As in both classes up until now, so at the very least if I totally bombed the finals, I will at least pass with a C.

Now that I am free of schoolwork for two glorious weeks, I need to catch up on all the stuff in my life that I have left slide. First and foremost, I have to clean the house. It is unequivocally a disaster, and I don't mean that in the way that your annoying neat-freak friends mean it when they apologize for "the mess" because one of their sofa cushions is crooked and they forgot to fold the throw on their recliner and maybe left a paper on the coffee table. No, no, my house is in a "if anyone comes in right now I will be utterly humiliated" state. So, yeah, this week will be a cleaning week.

Before I can do that, though, even if it is a priority in my mind, I have a bunch of errands to run, and I need to do them first thing tomorrow morning. Last year I kind of forgot to renew my car registration in time, for the first time ever, and it did not go well. Luckily for me, the officer who stopped me was very nice and let me off with a warning if I promised to go that same day to get it renewed, which I did. This year, though, I can't get it renewed without an emissions test, so that's what's happening first tomorrow. Then I will renew it online, and Bob's your uncle.

I also need to get groceries and buy several thousand gallons of enzyme cleaner for the basement carpet (I exaggerate only slightly). The poor basement carpet is suffering from Stressed-Out-Cat Syndrome, which translates to "the cats have peed so much outside the litter box that the entire basement reeks and there is very little I can do about it right now until I can afford to have the carpet ripped out and replaced." It is as much fun as it sounds. So the enzyme cleaner is not so much to fix the problem as put a band-aid on it so that the guests who are coming in two weeks don't flee my house because it smells so toxic. FUN TIMES.

The plan is to clean the kitchen first tomorrow if I can after my errands. I promised folks that I would do a stream, which I haven't managed in quite some time, due to real life commitments and also because I hurt my back for a while (because I am old and out of shape and my muscles decided that "fuck you!" was a good course of action for them) and sitting in my computer chair was way too painful for long periods of time. So I want to do a "quick" three-hour stream tomorrow. I also need to get back out for my daily walk, which I skipped today in favour of both sleeping and getting my final paper written. I have few regrets, except the procrastination on the paper itself, which is what prevented the walk in the first place. The irony of my procrastinating on that paper is that it was a paper on the importance of self-regulation. XD

Wednesday has been unexpectedly freed up. I was supposed to help a coworker paint a friend's house, but it turns out the friend isn't ready for us, which is good news for me. It means that I can spend the morning and early afternoon doing some cleaning and, more importantly, some de-cluttering. I had planned to de-clutter the house in 2018, but guess how well that went? If you guessed "not well," you guessed correctly. So I am trying again, because I refuse to pack all the crap I accumulated again next time I move. I have so many papers, y'all. So many. I want to get the house mostly presentable by the end of this week, so that next week, after I get off work, I can focus on making Un-Christmas dinner for my guests on the 29th. If I'm panicking about the cleaning, dinner will not be as good.

Wednesday afternoon is partially blocked off for a therapy appointment, and then Thursday morning I get to go in for even more blood tests. Yaaaaaay. Luckily the clinic opens at 7 am, so that should motivate me to get there early and beat the terrible, terrible wait times when I go later in the day, and since I will be up anyway, I can spend most of the day continuing Project Unfuck My House.

Friday I go back to work, and I won't be free again until Wednesday morning, so I have to get my shit together before then. Almost everything will be closed starting on Sunday for the holidays, and shopping on the Saturday before Christmas is a nightmare of epic proportions, so getting things done before then is a necessity. I need to eat at work, after all, and if nothing is open that means I have to make sure I prep food adequately for myself.

OKAY. It's past midnight (good job procrastinating on that paper, self), so I need to go to sleep now if I want to have any hope of flipping my schedule back around from nights to days. I will be back later with more riveting tales of domesticity.