Burn out

I realized that the last few weeks have nearly broken me. Not enough fun and too much work. And I got this email at 6am yesterday morning:

Hi Girls, is there any word on the machine?  Katie should we keep tagging
after all the missed females yesterday?  We are sitting on a 1.25 boxes
right now, I am just getting concerned, WHAT DO WE DO?


I've joined a project and my one task is to get genotypes to the delta smelt hatchery. Of course our genotyping machine has been down, and down for way longer than expected. I've been pressuring whoever I can and screaming and crying, but still it's not fixed. Finally I biked the plates over to another lab on campus and they ran them for me (at $60 bucks a piece!!). Basically it's been stressing the hell out of me because the hatchery needs to spawn fish at a particular time; because I haven't given them updated genotypes, the fish don't get spawned - then people freak out.

AND I've just joined this project and everyone probably thinks I'm an incompetent tool. This is not cool. Plus the ALL CAPS LOCK IS NEVER CALLED FOR.

And forget about teaching well...I gave my students an exam last night (modeled on the ones another professor used while teaching this class), and I realized (while watching them take the test) that I'd put several questions on there that I hadn't covered yet. Fucking brilliant.

So basically I'm flailing at life right now. There is not enough time to get done all that needs to get done. I need help triaging.

Yesterday, between pipetting, excel-ing, GENEMAPPER-ing, CERVUS-ing and stressing out about the smelt I took a moment to look up and thought to myself "this is fucked up. I don't like this." It's the first time I can recall where I've ever thought that about my job. Even over the weekend I was thinking about how good I have it. Is this what they call burn out?

As for climbing, over the past month I've been climbing just enough to start sucking slightly more slowly. That's got to change. Climbing isn't fun when you are just getting (noticeably) worse...or at least it isn't fun when you're getting worse at a super hard crag. So I kickstarted and climbed three days last weekend, and am planning on at least 2 this weekend.

Part of the problem is that I never climb in the gym - I know I should, but if I have time to climb in the gym, then I have a whole day and I may as well go outside. I'm sick of driving to Sac, and I'm not going to make a special trip just to go to the gym. Blargh.