The last fortnight has been exhausting, and not in a good way. I've been on-call at work, which normally results in putting in some extra hours and a few irritating overnight calls that could safely have waited till the morning. This time round it required going in till 1am one night, going in at 1am another night and going back in at 9pm after a full day's work the day after. I woke up feeling more dead than alive most mornings, rallied after a shower and cuppa, then returned to feeling like death a few hours later. Oh the glamour of my career. I'm passing the torch to someone else at precisely 8am tomorrow morning and quite frankly it can't come soon enough.

I've been so irritable over the last week and snapped at more than one person who didn't deserve such a sharp tongue. I've always apologised profusely afterwards and they've been very understanding, but I would have preferred to have not lost my calm in the first place. The other thing I've done that I've not been proud of is ‘forget' a presentation that I had to give. The frustrating thing is that I had actually written it, put it into power point and formatted it; but the exhaustion just magnified my public speaking phobia and I felt that I "couldn't do it." Childish? Yes, a little. And not how I like to see myself, but it's done now. All I can do is make sure that I don't let it happen again. I know that being organised and planning my presentations in advance means that I'm generally more happy with the end result, and that's something I'll be aiming for in the future.

I've wasted time on facebook too. Some of it was productive - getting back in touch with people that I honestly miss. Some of it was of the insecure, voyeuristic kind that always results in self-flagellation - looking at the holiday and party snaps of people I used to know, just to remind myself of how boring my life is and what a failure I am in comparison. The rational part of me knows that they've chosen the photos that show them at their happiest, prettiest and shiniest. I do it myself for goodness sake; my photo albums (yes, I am old-fashioned, and I like it, so there,) only have photos where I look really rather pretty, even though in real life I only resemble that particular self a fraction of the time. I only ever do the ‘face-stalking' thing when I'm feeling particularly down about myself. The good thing is that I can recognise it for what it is now, and use it as motivation to achieve the things I want in life, or at least have a go at achieving them.

And on that note, I'm off to go work on the two presentations that I have to give this week. It's my birthday this week too. I'll be a whole year older and wiser too so no one is going to buy my, ‘the dog ate my homework' excuse anymore.