Tired as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore

You know that level of tiredness where you just end up on the verge of tears for no good reason?  That's my day in a nutshell today.  I got to that point by about 4pm when the cloudy, drizzly, miserable weather, coupled with the already fading afternoon light just got to me too much.  And I had my most frustratingly difficult, but well-meaning (those are worse than the arrogant ones) meet-ee in half an hour.  In the end, maybe my surrender to my total and utter exhaustion took over and granted me a sense of humour to cope with it.  Somehow I managed to smile more and be kind enough to get through the whole thing.  Even when she admitted she'd forgotten to draw out my fee from the cash machine and would have to go and get it and bring it during the next meeting.

For ten minutes of that following meeting, I wondered if she would ever come back.  Had she perhaps realised how much I had started to despair at the meaningless, lack of progress of our meetings and had decided to do me out of my final payment before never returning again?

Actually, no.  She did come back, with the right amount.  And I made it through my last meeting of the day, discussing the advantages of space travel as an entrepreneurial venture, where Concorde had failed.  Very different things, I know, but all part of the world of aviation and technology.  We even both agreed that if we had a spare £127,000 we would probably want to try Richard Branson's spaceflight experience for ourselves.

Seeing as I also had an informal kind of Czech lesson today (with someone who has been a friend but has been away for such a long time now, I'm not sure what we are) I am a little dazed, ashamed at my abysmal level of Czech for someone who's been here a year, as well as shattered now.  I even talked about the little discrepancies in my life that are becoming less and less viable to ignore, and still I stayed in control.  I am utterly amazed that I didn't actually burst into tears in front of someone, especially her, but maybe that's what happens when you're on the last of the emergency reserves of energy - your body decides what extra energy it can afford to lose and overrides the usual capacity to cry and says, "nope, that's of no use to you now".

It's just as well, as tomorrow I will be cut off from society (i.e. I'm off to "the mountains" with no internet access) and thrust into a world of assembling flat-pack furniture into things that actually resemble furniture (hopefully) in order to help the architect settle into his new holiday retreat flat.  I only hope the sofa fits around the hallway and through the living room door, as I've had a sinking feeling since the weekend when we looked at possible sofas, that that item of furniture could be a calamity just waiting to happen.