Jingle Bells lang ang pahinga

The title is inspired by a jeep I occasionally see plying the Ortigas Antipolo route, with a sign at the back that says “Jingle Lang Ang Pahinga”, I’ve obviously changed somewhat to reflect a Holiday theme.

However, the underlying message is the same. This past week every waking hour had been accounted for, either working on one client or another, or writing one article after another, that even as I review my little scheduler on how I spent those days, it still all feels like a daze.

After a Christmas party last Friday night (my first one this year), and the long trip home the morning after, I realized I was just about as drained as I had ever been, and promptly did completely nothing the whole weekend.

Adding to this is the sorry state of my finances. Being self employed, I am obviously not subject to the typical employee’s 13th month pay or similar bonuses, a fact I’ve accepted over the years as being non-tethered is my preferred way of making a living.

However, a client’s recent financial woes have weighed heavily on mine as well, and I am left this week with almost just enough to get through it, without touching my savings of course.

That means, no Christmas shopping of almost any kind for me. Heck, I don’t know if I’ve enough to buy a new shirt, or at least eat at a fastfood everyday. This I have to come to terms with, while surrounding folks, clients, friends, other bloggers and the like, talk of finishing up Christmas lists of their own. All I can do is stare, nod and wish them well, and hope my own luck changes.

Nevertheless, forge on I do, as really I have no choice. This week, I have to finish a quickie project that’s taking longer than usual because of my workload, try to get WordPress and Coppermine to work one more time for the portia website (after a botched first attempt. Blame poor documentation.), get WordPress and Noah’s Classified’s to work together on the same page for PC Exchange, finally get some started on the Human Rights organization website work I promised to do (pro bono stuff), and a myriad other things web-related.

For non web-related, I’ve got a review of the Canon Pixma ip3000 printer, coming up, still sitting in a box in my room for the past four weeks as I keep forgetting to buy a printer cable for it (come to think of it, it’s rather rude that the writer tasked to review it has to buy/borrow a printer cable don’t you think?). It’d be the second to the last ‘gadget’ I need to write about for PDI’s lifestyle.

I also wanna do a good review of another gadget lent me, the fantastic Acer Aspire 5512 WLMi, of which I am duly floored, and I have a week or two to play around with. Terrific timing as I just happen to need a second PC to store data in as I reformat my daily driver one, slowed down substantially by what I suspect to be viruses. And of course, I wanna review King Kong on this blog, just because its the monster movie to end ’em all.

But finally, a post christmas plan = myself and Jill are hoping to bring friends together for dinner the week after Christmas, including the chief, Chelle, Pam, maybe some of Jill’s friends, and any other miscreant who’d happen to be available, probably for Dencio’s, or some such place with good (cheap) food. In my mind, it’d be a perfect time to be with people I appreciate and am thankful just for being with the whole year – what Christmas is all about as far as I’m concerned.

So that’s it. Here’s to the week before Christmas. May it end better than the week previous, and may I have money for it.