Need to destress

My stress level has been excessively high as of late. Some of this is issues with rush, not that it hasn't been going well but more that being an alum is something of a thankless job and involves a fair bit of grunge. A moderate amount of this is issues with my job; I seem to have fallen out of the "actually doing research" loop and the "interacts with PCA and travels" loop, leaving me as the whole of the "release engineering with no support" group. w00t. Some of this is me not getting enough sleep, and the world not really actually being that cuddly a place. There's the bit about randomly being cranky with people due to circumstances and things I happen to object to. And some of the stress is lack of personal downtime, though there's the related problem of lack of things to actually do during said downtime.

I kind of suspect that something along the lines of a console RPG would actually make me quite happy on that front. Complicated, of course, by lack of TV and game console, and a lack of desire to boot my PCs into Windows. Acquiring distraction also seems to fall into the "requires effort" bucket; if I could measure and plan and acquire wood and tools and get train and electrical bits I could finally start on the model railroad project I keep talking about. And sitting around home makes me feel guilty for my room being a small disaster and for not doing anything productive.

Plans for the forseeable future: at ET tomorrow night, in Gloucester for an LCS computer architecture workshop on Friday, at ET again on Saturday. I'm definitely taking Sunday off, but I don't know what this entails. Right now the weather forecast is clear, high of 72, so maybe it'll be a biking day. Or maybe it'll be a "finally spend money on something unspecified" day. We'll see when we get there.