This week…jeeze. I don’t know where it came from or what happened, but I have worked harder in these last four days than I can ever remember working before. I’ve stayed up until at least 2 a.m. on every single night, have racked up almost 60 hours so far, spent afternoons in four-hour teleconferences and late nights alternating between writing Flash ActionScript and adjusting a 500-slide Powerpoint presentation. Yeah, that’s 500 actual slides — without exaggeration.

I was busy enough as it was with just my “Flash Hell,” but today alone I spent a total of 15 hours working on projects that came absolutely out of nowhere, just this morning. One of them — the one for which I participated in a four-hour teleconference — gave us all so much trouble that it still isn’t done, so we’re going to have to get back to the grindstone on that one tomorrow. So I couldn’t even touch that Flash project today, and being that its deadline is imminent, it goes without saying that getting no time to work on it doesn’t bode well for the next few days — or possibly my weekend.

Yesterday, conversely, I spent the whole day working on Flash, but getting absolutely nowhere in the end. This is because I had to throw away everything I’d done and go back to the previous day’s iteration, since I found myself unable to proceed with the code I’d hacked together. I ran into a major problem with the project around 1 a.m., so I went to bed. There, I laid around for about an hour and a half just brooding over the issue, unable to shut my mind off, before I had a stroke of brilliance and got back up. Around 4:30 in the morning, I had finally and completely finished the Flash functionality. Sure, it’s a little crude, but if somebody wants to take issue with that they can do so at the appropriate time.

Now, though, I have to wrap the Flash thing in a really beautiful webpage design which I have yet to create. That was gonna be done today, until the shit hit the fan as previously described.

Work isn’t all that I’ve had on the mind. I may have mentioned this here before (and honestly, I’m too tired to go look), but just before our return from Thailand I was summoned for jury duty. First time ever for me. Now, because I have zero experience with this, I figured okay, here’s a jury summons for the local po-dunk county court. They were calling me to Fort Myers, in the county to our north, but I didn’t think anything of this because I didn’t realize that it was abnormal. (Typically, to serve on a jury in a county, you have to be resident of that county.)

My summons told me that I would be “on call” for approximately one month, and that starting on Monday night after 6 p.m., I have to call an automated phone system to find out if I have to be in court at the crack of dawn (quite a bit earlier than that, since I’d need to get there around 6:30 a.m.), or if I should just stay put for now and call again at a later date. I assumed that meant that I would have to keep calling until they needed me, at which time if I reported, I’d be done as soon as they either dismissed me or I served my duty on some kind of trial.

Well, I got to thinking about this, and it all seemed pretty strange. So I went back to the summons I received in the mail for a closer look. Apparently I missed something pretty damn big. This isn’t a po-dunk county court summons. This is a U.S. District Court summons. As in, federal court. Damn, okay. My first time out of the gate and they send me to the big leagues. All right. So the more I read up on this, it looks like I’m really and truly “on call” for the entire month of May, even if I get called to report one day. Apparently it’s possible to be called more than once, so I have to keep calling until they tell me to stop. That’s fun.

One other problem…with the help of my parents, Apple and I recently scheduled a little vacation for ourselves during the last few days of May, and it looks like we might have to reschedule it just to be safe. Honestly, until today I figured it was likely I’d be done with my jury service by then, but apparently I misread the gravity of the entire affair. Fah.

It could be an interesting time, to be sure — I joked with Apple that I could sit in a courtroom with a serious face on and pretend Jack McCoy was talking to me — but it leaves me quite nervous. And honestly, just the thought of the string-along unpredictability this will bring to my life for potentially an entire month leaves me weary. After this week I’ve had — and I swear it’s gone on for so long, it feels like it should have long been over by now — I’m sure that thinking about anything would leave me weary. At least tomorrow’s Friday. (I mean today. What is it, 2:30 already?) And on Saturday, Apple’s promised me that we’ll get to pick up dinner from Cilantro Tamales, where I’ve been wanting to go since before we went to Thailand. Yay!

I had to create some custom branding packages for several clients tonight, because it was sprung on me that we’re doing a release to their servers tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. and those packages needed to be done first. Wow, I’m so glad people think to include me in their plans that involve crucial elements of my work. So thanks to the last-minute notification, I just sent the materials off at 2 a.m. Hopefully there will not be any problem with them; I’m unable to test them in a live environment so I can’t be 100% sure there is no issue, although I do plenty of local testing. But do I really want to get up at 6 a.m., after a day (and a night) like this, to be on the safe side? Fuck no. If something happens, well, then that’s my payback for their forgetting to include me in the loop. Let someone else’s life be hell for a few hours if that’s what it takes for karma to balance itself.

Oh — one last thing. I read today that Fox unceremoniously canceled Drive, the midseason drama they just launched a couple weeks ago, after only four episodes. My dad and I watched the premiere (in HD!) while he was here a week or so ago, and honestly it wasn’t stellar, but it wasn’t too horrible. There was a pretty nice second-gen Trans Am in it, and Nathan Fillion (from Firefly, another prematurely-cancelled Fox series) too, and some other cool cars and intrigue, so I was trying to give it a chance.

Fox, though, saw the ratings and decided it didn’t need to give Drive a chance, it just needed to get rid of it as soon as humanly possible. Honestly, I saw the Nielsens myself and they were truly horrible. I think the last episode got less than 1.5 million viewers. Fox scheduled Drive right before the venerable 24, which we also watch, and 24 had its worst ratings in three years on the night when it was preceded by Drive. That was reason enough alone for Fox to blow Drive out the airlock. Seriously though, 24 is doing plenty to ruin its own ratings this season, but that’s another topic entirely.

Humorously, it seems that the various newspapers and media outlets were on pins and needles waiting to post about this show’s cancellation, because they were all dying to run the witty headlines they’d cooked up special for the occasion. Some examples:

• Short ‘Drive’
• ‘Drive’ runs out of gas
• ‘Drive’ parked after four episodes
• Fox Impounds ‘Drive’
• FOX Revokes License to ‘Drive’
• Fox Slams Brakes on ‘Drive’

And so, the Minear/Fillion curse strikes again! (Tim Minear and Nathan Fillion previously worked together on the ill-fated Firefly.) In an ironic twist, it’s been postulated that the ratings for Drive were harmed in part by the scores of viewers who, familiar with Fox’s penchant for canceling new shows with incredible swiftness, refused to tune in because they didn’t want to become involved in another series whose conclusion they would never see. I don’t blame ‘em!

And with that, I’m out of here. It’s almost 3 a.m. already. Secretly, perhaps I’m hoping that if I stay up late enough, and then get up late enough, tomorrow will end quicker and I can proceed to the weekend. But with the way things are going, I expect to be called late tomorrow with news that I’ll need to spend most of the weekend working on something-or-other, which would really just be the way. Wouldn’t it.

Nighty night.

Edit: Man, in proofreading this post, I’m finding a million typos. Guess my mind really is starting to melt after all.