Is this a tunnel I see before me?

[hrj]

I feel like I'm in that last mile of a marathon (not, mind you, that I've ever even contemplated running a marathon) where you're ok as long as you keep mindlessly putting one foot in front of another, but heaven help you if you stumble. The chimney sweep has done his thing. The living room painting is finished. I got in the first coat of woodstove blacking done while hanging around on my lunch hour while the chimney sweep worked. The floor guys have been confirmed for tomorrow morning (and I left a plaintive plea for them to arrive before 8am if possible since I have a meeting at work starting at 8 -- and forgot to warn them I might be late). My last homework assignment for biostatistics is completed and printed out -- the final exam is tomorrow evening, but based on the midterm and the advertised format of the final I don't feel the need to do any extra studying for it. Work has been providing some nice perks this week. I got an "on the spot" award for pulling some chestnuts out of the fire (that was the thing I dragged myself in for last Thursday morning before taking off sick) which includes cash money in addition to the egoboo. And today the "reducing human error incidents" team received a collective achievement award (nice hunk of plastic to put on my desk) for decreasing the rate by about 10-fold over two years, which includes an even bigger chunk of cash money. I like working for a company that understands that attaboys are all very well but nothing says "thank you" like cash. We also had an extra fancy food spread for the team meeting enabling me to blow off cooking dinner. Stopped by Borders on my way home to pick out holiday cards. Now all I have to do this evening is move the last few items out of the living room, sweep it thoroughly, get in my day's quota of patterned-gathering rows (currently on track at 40/72 on the first panel), and maybe start the write-up for my statistics paper. Nah, scratch that last one. I can start on that Thursday.