Thursday, June 25, 2015

I live in Hell and I'm losing my mind

I think I'm gong to lose my mind.  There's so many things that are frustrating me now in my life that I just want to go stark raving mad and get hauled away to the loony bin.  At least then I might get some peace of mind or at least a mental vacation for awhile.  And someone else can pay for the air conditioning.

Work: I've had so many meetings lately that some days I spend less than an hour sitting at my desk actually getting work done.  Why so many meeting?  I've been there so long that I'm the resident expert on everything so whenever a new project starts up that effects our unit, I'm asked to be the SME (subject matter expert).  Even when I'm too busy and they assign someone else in my place that always fails and I'm roped in later on because the original person can't handle it.  Well guess what?  I CAN'T HANDLE EVERYTHING!!!!

Also, due to the fact that I've been there so long and know everything, I'm also the trainer.  And I'm damn good at it (I did get my degree in education).  We've tried to split it up and have other people train on some things and that hasn't worked out very well.  I have to step in and "re-train" someone because they are so hopelessly confused.  It takes about 6 months to fully train someone so that they can function completely on their own and even then they probably haven't seen everything yet.  We had a new assistant start last June.  He got fully trained around late November/early December.  In January we had another assistant start.  He's almost done training, hopefully in the next week or two.  And guess what?  We have another person starting next month that will also have to be trained.  All these meetings and training are in ADDITION to my regular job.

Video capturing:  I've been so excited to finally get set up to capture video of game play and put them on line.  I've had some bugs and I thought I had everything worked out.  I spent a lot of money to get equipment to correct audio issues and at first it was working just great.  Then I seemed to have problems again.  The same types of problems.  I haven't figured out how to fix it permanently but I have figured out a work around.  Unfortunately that work around triples the time it takes me to edit a video.

Editing:  Now I'm having a new problem come up in the last couple of days.  Every time I go to edit a video when I get about half-way through and try to cut something out my whole video gets corrupted and I lose everything.  Not lose permanently, as I can always scrap the project I'm working on and start over from scratch.  But there is only so many times I can take trying to edit the same video file over and over again after it crashes each time before I start to go mental.  That's why I haven't posted a video in awhile because I can't finish editing any of the ones I've got recorded.  I think I'm going to have to edit in stages.  After I make a few cuts and things haven't crashed then I'll save the file, close out, reopen and try again.  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.  I'm not happy.

Weather:  I live in Arizona and the winters are absolutely lovely.  The summers, on the other hand, are brutal and I hate them.  I've been here for the last 19 consecutive years and I'm starting to feel like that's 12 years too long.  I can't take the heat anymore.  I can't take the endless blue skies with not a cloud to be seen anywhere.  It looks good on paper, but 114 degrees sure doesn't feel good in real life.  Yes, I have a pool and can take a dip to help cool off but that requires getting out in the sun and the heat.  I was only out there for about 20-30 minutes yesterday at lunch and I got burned.  Add a nice sunburn to the "uncomfortable heat" factor and you can see why the summers suck.

I miss a change of seasons.  Where snowy lawns give way to spring flowers.  Where cool breezes give way to sunshine and worth.  And then the air turns crispy and brisk as colder air comes in heralding the first arrive of winter and snow.  It's the cycle of life.  In Arizona you only have 2-3 months of "wonderful" and then 7-8 months of "bake in hell you SOB" weather.  I'm tired of it. 

I hear of other places getting inundated with rain and I openly beg them to send some my way.  Then I start to think.  Why should they send it over to me?  Why don't I just go to the rain?  Or at least somewhere that has weather and hopefully a change of seasons.  It's a scary thought about picking up to move just because of the weather (that and the fact that my job is sucking the life out of me) but I don't know how much longer I can take living here. 

Of course, I feel that way every summer and somehow I get through it.  Then the brief "winter" comes and I love living here.  But then the summer comes back and the cycle of my life repeats itself.  I'm finding this summer particularly awful.  I think we've had almost 2 weeks with temperatures above 110 every day.  That might be new record.  I don't think my other frustrations are helping me.  It's hard to get excited about editing after I've come home from a very stressful day at work.  And then when the editing doesn't work . . . .  You get the picture.

I've noticed some of my crabbiness has been getting into my commentary in videos (at least as far I can tell while doing what editing I can).  I'm trying not to let things get to me but it's hard when you're hot and miserable all the time.  I'm going to push through it and hopefully things will get better.  At leas the weather will get better . . . in about 6 months.  Until then I'll just keep living in Hell and losing my mind.  I'm pretty sure I don't have much left.  It's been fried from one thing or another for a while now.

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