That’s 245 words I wasn’t sure I was going to get today.

I haven’t mentioned much beyond “work has me swamped” this week. Here’s a little more detail:

1. The base is running an exercise. I’m our organization’s deployment manager.
2. We have to submit our requisitions for the slots we need to fill for next summer, and the window opened this week. We have a little time, but, we need to have the positions prioritized by which ones we need filled first by Friday. That’s easy. All of them, duh! All 49, er 52, er 53…well, that’s what it’s at today. Because without them filled, we risk losing our accreditation — on several fronts, since we’re an accredited institution for several reasons. Now. Somehow, that won’t happen, because we will figure something out, but a huge part of that something hinges on things we do now.
3. I had to brief the boss on the first part of plan for this yesterday.
4. I’m getting trained on things.
5. I had an assignment due Monday for my primary job — the one that’s been negated while I fill in for a new mommy (Yay for the new mommy. Boo for all her work.). I was missing key pieces of information Monday morning. Thankfully, I got what I needed. After I turned it in someone from another organization called and wanted to add something important to it. I sent him the information and am waiting for him to get it back to me.
6. I’m making sure other people get trained on things.
7. I can’t leave work each day until the deployment managers are released — that’s usually between six and seven.
8. Did I mention on top of exercise weather inputs today we had real world weather? Someone needs to be educated that real world trumps make believe.
9. What real world? Tornadoes. We spent at least an hour trying to convince cranky, uncomfortable students (all at least in their mid-30s) that they really needed to stay inside the hallways away from the glass — there really were tornadoes in the area.
10. Thankfully for us, this was across town from the base.
11. Not so fun for me — and several others — this was near my house. Across the street from my veterinarian. Nobody was seriously injured, but there’s a lot of property damage within a couple miles of my house — and many families aren’t so lucky. I had to wait from 11 am until 7:30 pm to find that out for certain. (But I was reasonably confident everything was ok — just not sure if Hershey’d been blown over in his doghouse or not.)
12. The good news? While waiting to be released, I put in some requisitions (to be “issued” one officer next summer, several times over).
13. The good news/bad news scenario? I have to be back at work at 4 am, but I’ll have plenty of time to input more requisitions into the assignment system. Because my counterpart is holding the hands of our “deployers,” while I update the computer system.
14. Our local NaNo group met at Panera today from 6:30 – 8:30 pm. Thankfully, after checking on the house and the “kids,” I made it for most of the last hour.
15. I’m starting to discover there might be limits to my ability to simultaneously multi-task.

So, yeah. 245 words looks pretty darn good. But my cable TV is out. Surprisingly? My cable modem is working just fine. I’ll take the cable modem over the TV any day.