Rather than bore you fine people with the oft mind-numbing tedium of my workaday life, I try to keep the shop talk (and the whining) to a minimum.

Sometimes, though, there's a useful nugget buried in the poop of everyday existence, the kind that's like a shiny diamond you swallowed by accident, not the kind that's like a piece of undigested corn. (Ugh. It has been a long weekend.)

Without getting too much into kerning and coding and the rest of that stuff that sends people's eyeballs permanently to the backs of their skulls, The BF and I have been hard at some crazy-making detail work this weekend. Outside of an hour or so spent in the company of Alan Partridge and some fine pinot noir, we've had zero social engagements, and relieved to have none. And until this evening, we'd not walked farther than from the bed to the bank of computers provided by our robot overlords to do their bidding.

Have I ever told you the story of the last all-nighter I pulled? 38 hours straight, compiling a massive PowerPoint presentation for a client who was desperately trying to hang on to a piece of business, lest they have to fire even more staff. Everyone else, and I mean, everyone, to an office boy, took at least a few hours off to nap or shower or whatever. Not me. I got up to take in and expel caffeine, and that was it. I wrecked my health for a few days, got in a big fight with my then-boyfriend (I'd been too absorbed to check messages or call, so naturally, he assumed I was dead, or worse) and guess what? They lost the business anyway.

Not that we're close to being that kind of crazy overextended. Still, at about six p.m., I started lobbying for an excursion to fetch dinner. On foot. In the fresh, open air.

It took about an hour, one I suppose we could ill afford to spare. But had we stayed and ordered in, would we have come out ahead? Even? Or would maybe a little bit of us have slipped away and put us farther behind.

It's easy to blow off a walk, a weekend, a good night's sleep, a blog post. It's hard to keep those bonus-extra goodies a part of life. I've been sneaking in bits of writing here and there as I wait to be fed more pages to tweak. I do it because I made myself a promise, I do it because it keeps me human. And if I start chipping away at my humanity, what good am I going to do your website, much less the world.

Lesson #8, picked up between HTML tags on a Sunday night?: The non-essential isn't.

xxx c

Image by smaku via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.