Deadline? What deadline?

I eat deadlines for breakfast. and lunch. and dinner. and midnight snack. and the next day's breakfast...

I've been working more or less straight through since Wednesday to get this chapter finished up for the intro astronomy text. It took for flippin' ever (and much longer than expected) to straighten out all the details, like making sure the figure numbers were actually, you know, sequential. That's probably kind of important. And that the reference went to the correct figure. And so on.

But it's done. And I think it's really improved. Certainly, it's more fun and interesting. And the problems are much improved. I love writing problems. No, really. I do. I like to write problems that say 'Ok, now we've told you how it is. How would things be if it wasn't that way? What if I moved you over THERE? What if I change this one thing---how would the universe be different?' Maybe I read too much science fiction, but I just love figuring out how to get people to stretch beyond reality so they can look back and see how cool it is.

Keep your fingers crossed, because in spite of the stress of SO MANY details, I really had a blast working on it, and would like to get the contract.

See, because this is what's wrong with me...

So, last night I wrote my first post, with all the goals and so on for my sabbatical. This morning, I woke up, came to open doors and so on for my conference-goers, and then sat down and wrote a draft of the Mercury article. Because that's fun, and what I should be doing is working on the revisions of the EB article. But that's not fun, because I really don't enjoy debugging software. Wait. Can I admit that out loud?

Anyway, I wrote up about 1700 words on it, which leaves about 900 for Adam. (Sorry, Adam!) Then I sent it away to him, so that he can have some input. He might like that.

But this is the thing about me. If I have a list of To-Do's in front of me, I compulsively work on them until I can cross something off. And then, when I'm down to the list of things I don't want to do, I add stuff to it, so I can work on that instead. Ugh. If I would just sit down and do those unpleasant things, I'd get a lot more done...

I also made an evaluation form for my conference-goers, was the main go-fer for all the tools and images and items they needed, took them to lunch, provided morning and afternoon snacks, and worked on my talk for the star party this evening. That's enough for one day, right? Right?

This is the fourth 14-hour day in a row. I'm starting to get a little tired, I think. And can somebody please find me some vegetables? I even organized the conference food, and I couldn't find any vegetables...