It has been the most exhausting. . .I don't know anymore how long it's been. . .long time.
So to start where I left off last week I woke up late to get to my flight to Urban City, but made it nonetheless. I slept, somewhat, and worked on research on the plane. Then despite the fact that I told my credit card company that I was going to Urban City and what I was planning to use the card for, the idiot company still put out the fraud alert when I tried to rent a car at the airport, making it impossible to use said credit card. Gah! The rental car company was really nice and let me call AL from their phone while we tried to figure out what to do. Ultimately, we had to let the rental card company hold money in our checking account so I could rent the damn car. So that was an exercise in purgatory.
That day, finally, I visited my grandmother. That was fun. Then it was off to the wedding locale and though I thought that everything was going to be mellow, I ended up being whisked away by my sister and her friends and it was a whirlwind from then on, right up until the part where one of the bridemaid's (not me!) didn't have her dress with her until 15 minutes before the wedding. Oy vey! I've never had so much hairspray on my head in my whole life -- and I was an inventive teenager. It took several days to wash it all out.
I got home Monday evening, then Absurdist Lover started his new job the next day. Because we share a car, I had to drive him, then take Absurdist Tot to his eye doctor appointment. The next day I worked my first day at the CSA (yay! in the rain! squashing beetles! yay!), then I went off to my final workshop that makes me despair of any other such workshops. I'm not signing up for anything outside my field that proposes to teach me how to teach from now on. I could critique the facilitators up and down, but I won't. Suffice to say: madness and badness.
Then Thursday, driving everyone everywhere, then going to teach, locking myself out of my office, driving everyone everywhere again. Friday, same thing without locking myself out of my office. All this, while making sure that Absurdist Lover is there at his new job by 8am. Which is a time I don't really believe exists. I now understand how people get their children to sleep by 9pm and themselves crash by 10: it's called waking up at 6. I crashed on the couch at 10pm last night watching Pollyanna. How embarrassing.
Today, I woke up at 7, took a shower (unheard of on the weekends), got Tot, etc. By 2pm, I had baked bread, gone grocery shopping, started the laundry, taken care of the Tot. I wanted to do anything but the grading I needed to do. When I finally got to it at 5pm, I figured I could do one in 20 minutes. And by the end of 2 hours, I had 5 graded. Then I nobly did 3 more once Tot went down to sleep. Now I'm considering my options: I could work on research, which I've strangely been doing in between other things; or I could eat chocolate chocolate chip ice cream. The last few nights I've been too exhausted to get to dessert! What is happening in this world?!
All I can say to all this craziness is that I can't wait until two things: 1) This quarter ends in less than two weeks and then I have about two or three weeks off. 2) We get another car.
I basically go through my day telling myself what a trooper I am, what a good job I'm doing, mostly just because I'm still alive at the end of the day.
This is the first time in a week I've been able to actually consider putting together this blogpost, meanwhile so many of you are off now. Next week will be better, even though I have to have AL to work even earlier (egads!); at least I won't have to go from quietly planting seeds in flats and hunting beetles to pretending I find a bunch of hot air intellectually and pedagogically inventive in a matter of hours.
Tomorrow's the farmer's market. Fitting all the lovely things -- like homemade bread, working at a farm, and going to farmer's markets -- alongside all the other things that must be done means pushing myself to do things when part of me just wants to park my butt on the couch, watch some 8 hour saga, and drool. I feel like this week I've been living my life in a higher gear (or a lower gear -- one that has more oomph). I'm not sure I'm up to it. Two weeks from now I'll be taking Tot to daycare and probably coming back home to sleep. Oy vey.
4 comments:
I totally feel your pain on one car. Hubby and I only had one car for the first nine years of our relationship. (We've been together for ALMOST 11 years.) So yeah -- running him to and fro (or vice versa) was such a pain. And we had eldest for two years before we had two cars. So yeah. It sucked.
In addition, reading this post made me exhausted, so I can only imagine how you feel. Get some sleep, my friend. You deserve it! (And some chocolate chocolate ice cream!)
I am having a similarly crazy stretch, and what frustrates me so much about it is that the thing that some rational parts of my mind says "Oh, you can cut that" are those things that center us, groundus, give us some kind of important pleasure.
So when I was reading this post, I was at first all, "Well if she's so busy, why's she going out to the CSA?" and then I realized, "To stay sane, of course." Which is precisely why I'm not really doing so well on that staying sane thing.
Peace and calm to you soon.
I am so relieved to find I'm not the only one who locked themselves out of the office! We've done the one car thing so you have my sympathy for driving AL to work. I started making all my appointments really early to deal with the fact that I had to drop him off at 6am and I was already up. Husband is already plotting "if we have to move, let's save money by going down to one car again." I responded with "yeah, that doesn't really save money." Because really? I don't want to do that again.
Thanks you guys. I keep coming back to your comments -- but then I don't say anything about how much they mean to me!
Fie: Of course I ate the ice cream. Eating sweets is how I cope, which explains how I'm stuck with the 20-30 pounds I really could do without.
Fie and Rented Life: One car sucks. It just does. This week, AL's got to be there at 7am. So by noon, it really feels like the day should be wrapping up. But no!
Horace: I've thought often about your comment about why do the CSA. Especially now when it looks like Tot is sick, and I'm really despairing of not going tomorrow. It is good for my sanity. But of course the real truth is I signed on to work there before I knew that AL would be getting an intense job, before I even agreed to do the stupid workshop from hell (which is now over). But though I have certainly spread myself too thin at times, I also just really don't like the bare-bones living I've been doing where the extras like crochet or inventive cooking or gardening or just about anything are already gone and coping becomes about TV and ice cream (both of which I like plenty!). But it is true that I probably should've signed on for this during a summer when I am not teaching, but c'est la vie. It's certainly good for me to be that quiet and focused; who said that the closest a working parent gets to relaxing is doing one thing at a time? (Maybe I did.) Anyway, that's how it is. It's very meditative, all that seeding and weeding. It's the yoga I wish I had more of.
Post a Comment