I know it's a bullshit thing to do, but when I'm having a bad day or week, I look around and see if someone else is having a worse go of it. I don't know why, because it's stupid to compare. Your reality is what it is, and the relative misery scale doesn't matter.

But Diana is having quite a shitty week too. Her car is fucked, and scares her enough that she wants out. It's sitting at the dealer again so they can fix it for real this time (third time's a charm). The plan is this weekend to get her a new vehicle. She's thinking small and Japanese.

If that weren't enough, her frustrations with Cleveland's income tax are being amplified by the free online tax services (for people making less than $52k or something, apparently subsidized by the IRS) losing her data and trying to get her to pay for it.

I suppose I can bitch about my week some more, but there's probably no point. I need to just suck it up and deal with it. My approach this evening was to dive in and make some progress checking off things on my forum app work list. I hit several, and that makes me happy.

Tomorrow and Friday I have minimal meetings at work, so hopefully I can nail down my project and see it on test Monday, with plenty of time before QA. And given the nature of it, I might have to do the early morning production elevate, which strangely I've never done in the two years I've been there.

I suspect that my karma battery is working up toward something awesome, like a huge tax refund. I'm theorizing it will be big, and that would thrill me to no end because the business could finally be debt free. That would be a glorious day. I expect my accountant to call next week.

Just as with writing code, if you break down life's problems into smaller chunks, it doesn't seem as hard.