I'm of two minds today and can't quite decide. Should it keep it low and mellow while I sort and clean and organize and possibly bake?
Or should I shake it?
I just don't know.
I'm frittering my day. I wrote a blog post and that felt good. And I talked with both my sister and my mother about scaling back the gift giving between the adults in the family and redirecting that energy/cash towards planning a vacation at the beach or at a lake in the mountains sometime next summer. (Both agreed, by the way, so that was very relieving.)
Lila's been sick for 3 days with a stomach bug (both ends, poor dear) and so far I've just had a lot of queasy, thank goodness. I'm grateful for the sick right now though, because our social plans for the weekend are so easily canceled. I hated to pull out just because I'm feeling overwhelmed. It was much easier to say our house has the plague.
I need to focus on getting the writing and designing finished for my friend's website/store. She wants it live by the end of the month and somehow my responsibilities with the project (unpaid) have been apparently doinking like rabbits and multiplying in the dark. It's a lesson...no more freebies. Every time we talk she has yet more she needs help with and so far the only compensation even mentioned is the "piece for my portfolio". Great, but damn. I've already put in 30 hours and we're looking towards at least that many more. Christmas month. And you know, I have a full-time job and a family. So yeah. My own damn fault and never again and all that. I got it.
I also need to get cracking on writing this essay I want to submit to an anthology that's in the works about learning how to eat. Three different well-published writers I know sent me the call for submissions. If that's not a nudge in the right direction, I don't know what is. But that was in August and the finals are due at the end of this month. I haven't even started. Or decided what exactly I plan to write about. Tonight I'd like to sit and do some free-writing about food and family to see where it takes me. There's an essay in here just waiting to unfold. I'm sure of it.
But first, lunch and this website work. Time to get it done.
We're home from our mad-dash-drive east to Boston via NY State where I got to spend an evening with a dear friend and her equally dear family. Seven days and Thanksgiving with my family, hosted by my sister -- meal cooked by the two of us. Codeine every night but last night to deal with The Cough That Won't Go Away. Chris drove all but an hour or so on the way home today — took us 12 hours. He's a machine. I'm incoherently blogging and watching Prairie Home Companion while waiting for Tyler to come home from the movies. We weren't home ten minutes and he had an invite from friends and dashed right out the door.
Was good to see my family. Lots of great conversations. Good food. Kids being breathtakingly charming. Glad to be home tho. Even if the elves did not sneak in and clean it. Or paint the walls like I not-so-secretly hoped.
I feel like one of those old ladies who talks about nothing but her ailments. But people, I'm sick again. That weekend ear infection that I got rid of with garlic/mullein oil has now settled in my chest and I'm barking like a dog/seal. Arf. I have meetings all day today, so can't stay home, but I"m for sure loading up my flash drive with files and working from the comfort of here tomorrow.
I forgot how much I hate bronchitis season.
Say a prayer if you inclined to such things for my stepdad. He broke his ankle over the weekend (in 4 places) and is having one of several surgeries today to begin the rebuilding. He waited too long to get treatment and tissue is compromised. Also, there's a high risk that when they tourniquet the leg, the pressure could cause the aneurysm in his groin to blow. Which would be fatal.
Good gosh golly, but it's been a crazy couple of months for my family. It feels like one of those soap opera families that I always joked about. There's always one I end up working with who has to take a ton of time off to deal with this crisis and that crisis. We call them shit magnets. Might be maybe my karma coming back around to bite me in the ass.
And let's not forget how weird it is that I first fractured a bone in my foot and sprained my ankle the weekend before. I've become human foreshadowing.
Urgh to the Grrr to the Ack.
I'm tired of stress being the background beat to my life. I'm sick of worrying. Of having to work so hard to drop out of that highly vibratory space of worry and anxiety and rush a thousand times a day in order to find the calm to keep plodding forward. Everyone around me is in the exact same state of **zzzwwweeeeeeggggzzzzz** and attempting the high wire on too little sleep and too much caffeine.
I went to bed at ten after eight last night, and I tell you when I heard Chris rumble down the drive at 5:30, I felt as if I could have slept for another five hours. But I got up so I could do a tiny bit of writing and have a cuppa.
I think I need to quit my beloved caffeine. I really don't know how to do it, but I'm sure it's turning the volume up to 11. OK. Just...after I finish this cup.
Ten years ago I was in energy healing school and I meditated every day and did Qi Gong and yoga and now I just eat, sleep, work, pray and yeah...worry. And it feels as if time is going by so much faster than it ever did before. I mean, honestly...wasn't I just on a plane five minutes ago on my way back from MA? And here it is Friday morning again? I don't know. I think I must be missing something.
I worked until 7 tonight. What with the flames licking at my heels all day I needed two hours of uninterrupted clean the shit off my desk time. The boss had leaned his head over the cubicle wall at around 2 wanting to know what all of the low grade Tourettic cursing was all about — and to say that we were all allowed to go home at 4 because of Halloween.
As if. I'm drowning. I'm drowning so hard and so deep, it's mind blowing. But I made a list of what I'm working on and huh, it turns out I'm doing the work of two full time employees right now. I must remember to ask for a raise.
My boss also heard me responding to a coworker who came in to tell me that my name had been bandied about quite liberally at a meeting she had just come out of accompanied by phrases such as "should have had that done a week ago" and "knows I signed off on that on Monday" and "should have come to this meeting". My response? So and so (person who said these things) can kiss my big, fat, lumpy, white ass. Twice.
Our new work culture since the LA company bought us? Hair on fire. Non stop emergency. No planning. Nothing in the right order. Re-do everything ten times. Piecemeal dissemination of pertinent information. By 3:00 my throat was sore. Really sore. Big old lumps in the side of my neck.
I came home, had a Cold-Eze, an Airborne and this:
Now I'm going to sit here for an hour and do some much-needed writing while I sip on my medicine.
Effing figures.
The teenage boy is refusing to get out of bed to go to school, complaining of lack of sleep due to a headache that he told me the ibuprofen had taken care of when I checked in at bedtime.
Dude. The husband and I have a date here at 11. Go. To. School.
He started angling for this last night, and I said no then. I'm working from home and would like to have the bloody house to myself for once. Some days? Family is not my favorite.
Especially when it defiantly interferes with my afternoon sumthin' sumthin'.
I'm working from home tomorrow and brought three files to knock down: the assembly instruction manual for the new wood swing sets we're selling (did I mention that one's being delivered to my house to test the assembly? 12 hours for 2 people to put together? $1K wood swingset with double decker clubhouse and 2 slides? perks!), an affiliates letter/contract and lastly a packaging positioning presentation.
Also, I'll tighten the screws on my friend's web site copy. Plus a lunch date with the huz here at home alone without any kids during daylight hours when I'm more...uh...libidinous than other times.
And this song.
off of that album?
makes me oh, so nostalgic. Just don't ask "for what" because I have no idea.
Well, the x-ray shows a very bad sprain and a partial fracture that I need to watch out for. Came home from work the past two days and elevated the foot, wrapped in bags of frozen corn, and read the latest Annie Dillard book...taking notes because gracious this one triggered some stuff in my head.
It's good to sit like this and let the to-do list just wait in the wings.
I'm getting on a plane Friday morning to surprise my mother for her birthday. Hopefully the air splint doesn't hold me up at the security check.
What's your cure for the common cold?
Is there a cure?
I've tried it all...sleep, vitamin C and echinacea, hot tea made with fresh lemon, honey, ginger and cayenne, miso soup, garlic broth, sleep, water, sleep.
Sometimes I can catch it early with kold kare, airborne or a similar product.
There's always a six week period of the late fall/early winter where I think the only cure is to live in a plastic bubble.
