June, June and June

For those of you who don't know I work in fund raising for a college. The end of June is the end of our fiscal year. Thus June is always our busiest month of the year as everyone scrambles to meet their year-end goals.

This year June started in May so we are now well into our second month of June. Third June will be the first couple weeks of July. How many Junes can you have in one year? My answer? Well, three of course! As you can imagine fund raising in the economic climate that the U.S. currently finds itself is, in a word, difficult. I sympathize with our front line fund raisers, those people who are actively going out to solicit people asking them to donate their money to the college. These folks, my colleagues, do an amazing job. This is not easy work even under the best of economic conditions. And is not something I would ever want to do to earn my living.

Instead, I sit at a desk behind the scenes and make sure that all the gifts and pledges received by the college are recorded correctly in our database and receipted correctly per IRS regulations, manage all the other types of data entry (address, phone and e-mail address changes for instance which are just a small slice of all the kinds of data we update), manage the people that do all of our prospect research, act as a liaison between our Accounting Office and our IT department, write ad hoc reports, answer all sorts of questions and basically put out fires and problem solve all day.

June is a tiring month for doing all of the sorts of things I listed above. Everyone has questions, everyone needs things yesterday and the volume of our gift entry spikes which means the volume of all our other work spikes as well. And since June started in May we're still only about half way through "June" now or in the midst of second June as we've all taken to saying.

I am exhausted. Mentally I am drained and I have been having bizarre dreams again the last few nights. I am more than ready for a vacation (which I will be taking as soon as we close our books after third June is over, otherwise known as the middle of July). Being mentally drained makes it really hard to be creative. Really hard. All I want to do when I get home from work is sit on my couch and drool as the TV plays mindlessly in front of me. It's very hard to do any serious (or even unserious for that matter) writing when your brain can barely string two words together, dinner consists of pretzels and water because the thought of cooking is overwhelming, and you feel sort of beat up because you're shielding your staff from crap they don't need to deal with or even really concern themselves with. So the writing that I thought I'd have so much time for now that the tv season is over has not yet happened.

I have a writing prompt I need to work on and I even have an idea for it, but I haven't yet taken the time to sit and write it and then post it for my writing group. I feel bad about that, but I'll get to it in the next couple days. After work and my second coffee date of the week tomorrow. And perhaps then after a good night's sleep or maybe not, we'll see how tomorrow afternoon goes.

Oh, and I'm itchy again. Somehow, even though I was cautious, I have given myself poison ivy. Again. I did it twice last June and it was just awful. Thankfully it's not nearly as bad this June. But I'm not happy. And also very itchy. I am beginning to dislike all aspects of the month of June and would like to just skip right from May to July. The only thing I love about June is the fact that it stays light until so late. And fireflies, I also love the fireflies.

What better song for this post than Poison Ivy by the Coasters?

She comes on like a rose, but everybody knows
She'll get you in Dutch
Now you can look but you better not touch

Poison ivy, poison ivy
Late at night while you're sleepin' poison ivy comes
a'creepin'
around