Happy news & a stalemate

THANK YOU everyone who helped out in this; I won! :D

I have to say that the best part of winning this contest (aside from getting 10 free pairs of socks and the fact that they're going to produce my sock and put it up for sale! ;)  has been getting in touch with the lovely girls at SockItToMe.com - they're very friendly and courteous and I can't wait to see what the sock will look like in production - wheee!! :)

 In bonus happy news, my Starry Night sock also made the top ranking and SITM want to try to produce that one too - however it's going to require some tweaking and simplification, since too-dense patterns tend to make the socks too rigid and un-stretchy to go on your foot. So I'll have to do some more labwork on that one (removing lines and de-cluttering), and we'll see what SITM's sock producers say... I'm a bit questionmarked at how I'm going to keep it looking like a dauby van Gogh, but I'm going to take a whack at it.

Have to say that I'm very happy about this, it's like my awful, soul-crushing  job as a technical illustrator (which, to be fair, taught me my mad skillz in CorelDraw, hehe ;) finally paid off - in technicolour! :) 
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Giddy highs aside - dammit, I've hit a total stalemate in my work. I was given a well-needed extension to re-do my last journal article for my PhD thesis, meaning that I went from a nerve-frying high of 68-70hour work weeks to... frazzled out. I'm entirely certain of what to do next but I can't seem to muster the energy, night or day, to actually do it.

I think I fooled my body into believing that after my insane cramming, a total mind-blank vacation was due... But now that it's clear that I'm not out of that tunnel yet, my body feels cheated of a well-deserved break, and instead I'm sitting here with an empty gasoline tank - there's no revving up of engines to be had. I feel awful at the end of most working days for this, but it's like I can't bring myself to taking a proper break either. The catch 22 is that the longer I wait, the more 'unworthy' I feel of actually taking that break...

I'm sure that the emotions I shut away during the january-february work frenzy making a bubbly comeback aren't helping either... it gets so much harder to keep suppressing them when the deadline has suddenly jettisoned off into a much more distant future. 

I  have no good answers to how I get myself out of this one, so if anyone has experience or a story of how you got out of a no-can-do doldrum state of mind -- hewp, please?