Whacked

I felt completely whacked at work today. I needed coffee before coffee, as well as after coffee, just to keep my eyes open. The forty-plus hours I spend in the office each week feel more and more like “dead time”; all the really important stuff has to be squeezed into my remaining waking hours, of which there are never enough. My weariness could also be due to yesterday’s corporate jolly. For our second team building in just three months, we visited a number of wineries to the north and west, sampling their produce of course. When we voted on an activity, I chose wine tasting because it would be the least stressful option; it seems several of my colleagues felt the same way. Later we went to the pub – this was stressful for me because it involved my workmates recounting tales of drunken escapades while I sat in silence, so I didn’t stay long.

Last weekend, out of the blue, I received a rather exciting email from America. A publishing company in Illinois somehow stumbled upon my puzzle website and wants to buy forty of my puzzles for US$20 each. I started constructing puzzles in 2005, when the whole world was going Sudoku crazy, and have created a variety of word and number puzzles since then. A few of them made a guest appearance in an Aussie magazine in 2006, but that's about it, so when I got an email for someone willing to pay me eleven hundred bucks (in our money) for my puzzles, I was over the moon. I'm a little nervous dealing with unknown people over the net, but they seem legit, so I'm willing to take the risk. Who knows, this could lead to something big.

The tennis interclub season began in earnest last Saturday. Thanks mainly to my partner, we comfortably took out the men's doubles 6-1 6-1, but the mixed match was a totally different ball game (it was still tennis, but you know what I mean). We were lucky to get one game in a 20-minute first set, and though we weren't playing that badly, I couldn't see a way back. The opposing woman was a demon at the net. I was heading down one of my infamous spirals of negativity, talking incessantly to both myself and my partner about how screwed we were, when my partner told me to stop talking and to act more positively. From that moment the match turned. I became more confident in my shots, and my intensity levels rose a notch or two. My partner's play also improved as she was no longer feeding off my negativity. Our opponents couldn't quite hit the heights they reached in the first set, and we wound up 1-6 6-3 6-3 winners, wrapping it up on our fifth match point. After the match we ate and chatted; our opponents were such nice people that I felt a bit guilty that we beat them. One of the highlights of interclub tennis is that you meet new people every time you play.

The current spell of dodgy weather is predicted to continue into Saturday. A good day for making puzzles I think.