can't focus on the thing

Although I love the extra time I get when I start work late I do not love getting home late.

There is so much.
So, so much.

I wish I had time to sit down and do this daily.
Motivation.
That's the big one.
Every morning I sit here with a million thoughts running through my head, seeking an outlet...  even if they're stupid, meaningless, random ramblings the thing is...
The thing is it's so much better for me to just let it all out.  To sit here and let it pour out so it's not cluttering up my mind.
My brain is like a stove.  A good eight burner stove top.  Every burner going at once.  Sometimes its so hard to keep the seven burners that aren't immediate from boiling.  If more than two start to roll a panic attack hits and then all bets are off.  I could be fine in a few minutes or it could take a couple hours and I spend the rest of the day shaky and jumpy.  The slightest thing could set off another panic attack and if there's more than one a day I don't want to know what will happen.
I usually have one on the way to work every Wednesday.
Should be fun.
The anxiety starts to ramp up...
But we won't discuss that.
Again...  so much.

I can't focus on any one thing because there are too many things.  When I do manage to focus on something I run out of time and the daily grind interferes and then who knows how long it will be for me to get back to the thing?
Pressing needs.
Pressing desires.
No time.  It's an hour of chores that stretches into two hours...  then it's time to fold all the laundry and give treats to the cats and three other things pop up and in the interest of not starting another huge list I take care of them just to find that it's time to fold more laundry and make dinner and I never got to the thing.

Making it a point to focus on certain things in my life is helping to get things done but my kitchen cabinets are out of fucking control and they're getting to the point where I don't know how much longer I can handle it.  But the curtains.  I need to focus on hemming and making and hanging the curtains.

No time.
If I could take the day off I would be able to focus on the curtains today.
I could get so much done because there's nothing else to do.
This is why I want to cut my days down to three...  to give me that day to focus on the thing.  Whatever the current thing may be.

post con lack of motivation

Honestly, conventions are exhausting.  If I still wore that dam FitBit it would have exploded.  Of course, all the driving I also did brought the fact that I need my wheel bearings checked to my attention.  I've had this problem before, it's no fun.  I drove that one until the wheel bearing gave out, that was...  and interesting drive.  Ever drive a car with a wobbly wheel?  I don't recommend it.  Scary.  So I'll get that dealt with in the next couple of weeks as it's still minor.  Of course, our mechanic retired and closed up shop so the joy of finding a new mechanic is overwhelming.  As a woman this experience can be extra super fun.

My work schedule is finally back to normal after three weeks of having to constantly remind myself what day of the week it was and which days I had to be at work.  It's a balm to my poor tired brain and coupled with the con exhaustion I'm finding it very hard to give a damn that there are three days worth of dishes in the sink, we're running out of clean underwear, and the fridge is empty.

I have a pretty long list for today...  almost an entire sheet of paper...  I had all the drive and motivation to do it last night, went to bed optimistic.  Went to bed with a game plan.

Overslept by ten minutes and once the boy was dropped off at school I promptly came home and did nothing.

I know damn well I'm using the excuse of the spousal unit's state of unconsciousness.
I'll get started when he gets up.
Besides, I'd like to run my errands first and I have no desire to back his car out of the driveway to unearth my own.

Let me finish this joint and I'll get my ass in gear...  or something.

who needs sleep

Confusion and forgetfulness.  Kinda awful.
I know there's depression and anxiety in there and to add the hormonal bullshit of dealing with the perimenopause is taking its toll on me.
Did I mention sleep?  I need so much more of it.
I recognize that I need to make changes in my life for the betterment of my health but who doesn't?  Getting more sleep as I get older is apparently part of that but it's really hard.  Part of why I don't get enough sleep is because I treasure my quiet  time in the evenings and I'm incredibly selfish.  In the moment I'd rather have an hour to watch a show or read.  Of course the next morning I'm irritated and wish I could get another hour of sleep.
I keep telling myself to stop, to get the sleep, the books and shows will be there tomorrow.
But then I remember that by doing so I'm the one who is making changes to my lifestyle in order to accommodate someone else because...  in all honesty...  at least 2/3 of the time I'd get an extra 20-40 minutes of sleep every night if my husband would get his fucking CPAP for his sleep apnea and stop snoring loud enough to rattle the windows.
Or he would rattle the windows if we hadn't had them replaced last week.
That was a busy, crazy day but it's so nice having decent windows that open smoothly, lock reliably and cut out more noise from outside.
Windows aside...  He would sleep a lot better as well and I wouldn't have to listen to him constantly bitching about how he didn't sleep and he's so tired.
I want to punch him every time he says he's tired.

This entire week has been bullshit and there's no point in laying it all out.  Scheduling, dealing with humanity, traffic, parental drama...  it's a story and-a-half and not very interesting.

Having to get up before the sun rose was not a pleasant experience.
I work a half day today, day five of seven days where six of them I have to work and three of them are spent at a convention.  After work I'll come home, get cleaned up, and drive 40 miles to the Con.  No idea how long I'll be there, but I'll be back tomorrow and Sunday as well...
I'm unexcited about the Con and would rather spend this afternoon and tomorrow home alone in bed.
At least my schedule reverts to normal after this.
Three weeks of a weird schedule have screwed with me.  I lost September and can't keep the days of the week straight.

the horrible fucked up shitty ass no good week

This has been one hell of a week.
Wednesday I seriously considered calling in sick to work...  I had forgotten that one of my co-workers is on vacation this week so it wouldn't have worked anyway, but the whole reason I went in there was because I was expecting my cat's ashes back that day.  I'd been told a week before that he'd be brought in that day...  and he wasn't.  I was livid, and I was horrifically sad.  I cried for hours.  I made it through the day, including the last minute appointment that ensured I stayed until almost nine pm.  The appointment included blood, urine, x-rays, fluid administration and fine needle aspirate of multiple lumps.  We got all the results in today, conclusive.  Lymphoma.  He's dieing.  He's a great dog.  I'm sad.
Yesterday my friend died in my arms.  My canine friend.  Ten years old, Golden Retriever, cancer.  Fuck cancer.  His mom and dad stayed until he was sedated so I lay down next to him, wrapped my arms around him, put my head on his and told him how loved he was while he took his final breath.  I stayed with him a few moments after and cried.  I will miss him so much.
I was also inches away from a terrible collision moments after leaving work.  Someone thought making a right hand turn in front of me would be a good idea, luckily I had just enough room, when I swerved to avoid him, I got the car back into the right hand lane and regained control instantly.  Although for a split second I was afraid my car was gonna fall onto its side.
Today the window guys came in to get exact measurements so they can order the new windows we're finally getting.  I'm looking forward to not having to wipe the condensation off the windows every day this winter.  Hopefully we don't have a recurrence of the mold issue we had last winter.  That was horrific, but easily dealt with and only surface mold from the moisture collecting in the drapes and running down the wall to the tops of the baseboards behind the bed.  So nasty.  Anyway...  the window guys have informed us that we can't have the windows that I want, not my first choice, not my second choice, in any of the bedrooms.  Because?  Egress.  There's some law, whether it's city, county, state or whatever that says I need a certain square footage when the window is open in order to facilitate egress.  In other words: the window needs to be big enough for someone to get out of the house if there's a fire or other event.
So I'm not excited about the windows.
I don't fucking care anymore.
We need new windows, so we will get new windows.
It's like buying new scrubs for work, or school uniforms for the boy.
WoopDeeFuckingDoo.
I'm sad that I'm no longer excited about this thing I've wanted and waited for for a year-and-a-half.
I want my fucking cat.

I did get my new computer on Thursday, it's in a box under my bed.
I also got a raise on Wednesday, so that was pretty awesome.
Today I get the evening to myself after I put the boy to bed because the spousal unit is out.  Time to myself is precious during summer vacation - I am grateful for this.

However...  my plans of coming home from work tomorrow and spending the evening cleaning my desk and setting up my new computer and speaker system have been completely blown to hell because my mother-in-law wants to take us out to dinner at Sweet Tomatoes.
I wonder what fucking coupon she found.
I don't like her.  I don't want to spend any time with her and having to go out to dinner with her sounds like the perfect way to end this horrible fucked up week.
At least I spent less at the grocery store than I anticipated.  I buy a ham tomorrow and maybe I'll have enough money leftover to at least do one more fun thing with the boy before he starts school...  which reminds me.  I'll have to leave notes for my husband about school supplies and uniforms...

Tomorrow is another busy day and I'm not happy about it and I want this week to be over.  Over-time aside, I'm sick to death of being at work and I want to take a week off, send my family to Siberia and sit around the house with the cats doing whatever the fuck I want for seven days.

Never happen.

hypocrisy hurts my brain

Let us not speak of the things I do all day.
Let us instead speak of the things I do not do.

The spouse is starting to crack down on certain things the boy does that he does not approve of.  He seems to have a hard time understanding that the reason the boy sees these things as acceptable is because his father does them.  To tell him to go do something "else" and to "put away the screen" when you would rather be playing your phone game is incredibly hypocritical of you.  Yes, the spouse acknowledged that but how do I respond?  The boy has come to me many times because his desires to get up, to go out, to be active...  are thwarted by his father's desire to sit still, do stare at a screen, to be lazy...  yet the boy is scolded for being lazy.  When I am home with the boy we go out, we do things, we do not spend the entire day staring at screens...  yet this is the belief my husband has.

He does not notice what I do all day, unless I don't do it.
If I stop doing things for a week or so he starts to notice that the house is messy, he complains about having no clean socks or underwear, he bitches about the cat hair...  he has no idea that bare minimum one hour of my day is spent taking care of these things...  the cat hair, the dust, the laundry, the dishes...  I know he doesn't think dinner fucking cooks itself but the kitchen is not magical, the floors don't eat the hair and the couch doesn't shake itself off every couple of days like a wet dog.

He wants the boy to ride his bike, but the only one of us with a bike is me...  and that requires me to get out every day on my bike...  on my days off that's not a problem...  but the days I work?  The spouse is still sleeping when I leave for work and after my 45 minute commute he's still sleeping...  He's asleep when I clock in and by that point I've been up for three hours, have done most of the daily chores, gotten the boy to school/camp and prepped dinner for that evening.  After an eight hour shift I have an hour drive home through typically worse traffic than I encountered that morning and once I arrive I'm bombarded with neediness from four cats and two people who all want my opinion, my attention, me.  All I want to do is put my shit down and eat my dinner...  but that can take forever to get to, especially when my presence sends a subconscious signal to my husband that he can now relinquish the dinner responsibilities and leave me to time the sides and get everything out of the oven when the timer goes off.  ALL I WANT TO DO IS SIT DOWN AND TAKE OFF MY SHOES but by the time I've got the side going, my shit finally put away and have had a moment to go to the bathroom it's time to eat...  and as previously stated... the kitchen will not clean itself.  The solution is not to have the boy clean the kitchen, but to split the duty, to share the load, to not leave it on my shoulders every single night.  If I don't do the dishes there's a 90% chance that those dishes will still be in the sink when I wake up in the morning... and if I get mad about it...  I'm unreasonable and the bad guy.

So I'll sacrifice a little more of my free time to get the boy out of the house even more...  to make sure to do it when the spouse can see, to photograph it when it happens and slather the information all over social media so he's aware that the boy and I did not spend the entire day sitting around the house with our faces in our screens...  after all...  we wouldn't want to spend our days together the same way he spends his days with his dad.  That's not fun at all.

it's a lack of respect to be honest with you

I can't keep up.  I admit it loud and proud and that's why I only work four days a week.  I can't keep up with all of it otherwise.  Furthermore, unlike the rest of my co-workers, I have to have my days off consecutive or I completely lose my shit.  It would probably be different if I had some help around the house but despite making sure every single dish is washed I inevitably wake up to find a dirty dish or two or three in the sink...  Despite making sure we never run out of clothes and the fact that I keep up a steady run of laundry for two or three straight days every week my husband still has a pile of clothes on his nightstand that could potentially suffocate him should it fall.  It could be worse, but I started folding his clothes so they would stack better after an unfolded stack of clothes really did fall down...  but not on him...  no...  I could never be so lucky as to have him be the victim of the consequences of his inaction.

I'm tired of hearing "this hurts so bad" from him.
Like I'm walking around feeling great all the time.  I've dealt with chronic pain longer than he has...  but he seems to forget that.
I hate hearing about how fat he is.  He bitches constantly about it...  but rarely does anything about it...  and when he does he just bitches about how much it hurts.  He'll become the fat guy with chronic pain who can't do anything about his weight because of the pain.  Meanwhile I'm over here wishing I could feel normal for just ten fucking seconds and I'm skinny.  I'm active.  I'm strong.  I don't let it stop me.

I'm tired of him getting pissed off at the boy...  when he does the very things he tells the boy not to do.  Or doesn't do the things he tells the boy to do...  and then wonders why the boy thinks his father doesn't like him.

I'm tired of the lazy.  I come home from a long day at work and spend another hour doing things around the house before I sit down.  I'm on my feet all day long at work...  he comes home from his job where he sits, and he sits.  He sits and sits and sits and whines about being fat and bitches about how things don't get done and says he needs to stop wasting his weekends but stays up way too late, sleeps half the day away and then sits and sits and sits because sports and cell phone games are more important than anything else.  I work around him and get pissed off that he's sitting...  and he never gets up - motivated by my action to do something...  So I sit.  I sit and read and read and read until that's all I want to do because the fantasy world is so much more interesting than the fat and lazy spouse who bitches about being fat and lazy yet has a multitude of excuses for why he can't stop being fat and lazy.

too much too little

These last few days have been rough, interesting, stupid and...  there have been moments of fun.  I have tons I want to write about but of course I postponed actually writing until there wasn't enough time for me to actually write about anything meaningful.

We said goodbye to Number 3 three days ago and my heart is still breaking.  We still start crying randomly, the other four cats are all off kilter and things are just not right around here.  I'll start healing when I get his cremains back in five days.  Fifteen years with that cat.  I miss him so much, there's a huge hole...

The spouse infuriated me with the "it's okay when you do it but not when I do it" line - again.  He has no idea how hypocritical it is.  Especially when he uses it when I'm in the middle of telling him why it's different, or that it's really not the same thing at all.  He doesn't listen to me, so I don't know why I try.  Last night I learned that the only way to avoid issues when we're out walking somewhere is to let him get super far ahead of me, don't complain or even comment on it and just let it happen.  I can't keep up and if I pull ahead because I see a good way through the crowd he -for some unknown reason- will not follow me at all.  I've proven that I can break through crowds better than he can, but he has to lead the way or I leave him behind and he gets pissed off and sulks.  However, if I get pissed off and sulk I'm being unreasonable.  Lesson learned.  Got it.  No problem.  I'll struggle and flail through crowds in a mad attempt to keep up with you and be super fucking happy about the fact that you pull so far ahead you can't see me, can't hear me and have no idea where I am.  Never mind that I never get more than 10 feet ahead of you and am fully aware of where you are at all times - you have to be in front.

I'm exhausted but that's not new.
The house is a total wreck and I'm struggling to care.
It's totally time to go and I can't even remember the other things I wanted to mention.