I’ve talked now and again about working as non-profit fund-raiser, and how that means every now and again I fall down the rabbit hole of some big proposal cycle.

Well, it happened again. One of those perfect storm combination of factors: an unusually short response window on a federal RFP, bisected by the holiday season, and then with the added factor of one of the main project/proposal team having a medical emergency in her family. It was the kind of thing that was completely unforeseeable, legitimately important, and undeniably the kind of top priority that pulls you off the office map. Absolutely no blame or hard feelings about that.

However, the ripple effect is that the other two members of the main proposal team (including yours truly) had to carry more effort and work longer hours to get us to the finish line.

So this is kind of how it went for me.

Amazingly enough, not only did the proposal get finished (and I’m proud of the quality of this one, too!), but I managed to keep some other pieces of life spinning along.

I figured out most of my list for this year’s reading challenge, finished my first book, and started my second.

I’ve begun digging into state managing prep and agreed to take on a small supporting role in the company’s juvenile production of Seussical. (Yet another testament to the power of staying open to possibility.)

I took a small step to re-start the de-cluttering project by purging a bunch of purses and briefcases from the closet.

I managed to represent myself and my non-profit at a conference I attended last week right after the proposal went in, despite the intellectual whiplash of ricocheting from one flavor of intensity right into another.

And I haven’t flunked out of my Coursera class, yet.

Obviously, any of these could take a post of their own, but I’m still a bit too exhausted from the all of the everything to want to write at such length this evening. One of the things Coursera has taught me is that one’s brain clears out toxins while sleeping, a revelation that I have found, quite frankly, to be rather terrifying in light of my usual sleep-cheating ways. So, now that I’ve emerged from the proposal/conference grind, I’m trying to be just a little bit smart about unplugging from the computer earlier in the evening and doing some reading before bedtime instead.

So, Dr. Zhivago (PopSugar book the second) calls…..

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Image credits: Giphy. Dinah waving bye-bye, Alice tumbling, Alice and the wrong-way mirror.