Days like this

I don’t want to write today. I’m tired. I was up at 4 A.M. giving the dog a bath. (Trust me, he needed it.) It is nice outside today temperature wise and there is a steady breeze blowing, even if the overcast sky promises rain.

I think I would rather read and ignored the rest of the world. I had to people yesterday. There were not many, but I still entertained three other adults at my house. (Okay, so one was my mom and another was my brother but they still count.) It was my son’s birthday party so there was decorating and cleaning to be done beforehand and clean up afterward.

I have yet to wake up fully today and it is almost 5 in the afternoon. Maybe I should just go take a nap. I needed to get at least a blog post done, though it was very tempting just to skip this week. You guys came very close to getting ten ways to kill or protect against Vampires, rather than this post of me whining. I’m trying to save that for the book I am working on. (Or at least October so that it can be a sort of Halloween post.)

Anyway, I showed up and put words down on the page. That is the important part. You guys keep doing what you do and I will keep plodding along too. Have a good week.

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Allergies

I am not feeling too well today. It isn’t anything serious, just a savage allergy attack, but it has me keeping my asthma inhaler close and a hot cup of tea closer. My eyes are itchy and it is hard to breathe. Poor Molly, my dog, has had to stay outside in the backyard today because I can’t take the extra allergy irritant.

I’m not sure if I mentioned it before but we recently discovered that I am allergic to my dog. She is a mostly outside dog anyway so it isn’t too much of a problem. I let her in if it looks like rain or if it is too hot outside, of course.  She has plenty of shade and dry places to stay but she really doesn’t like water and her fur is so thick I worry if she stays out too long when it is hot. So despite me being allergic, she can often be found snoring in the floor behind my computer chair as I write. I just have an extra cup of tea and make sure I take my allergy meds. Today is just extra bad. I know it is supposed to rain tomorrow so she will probably be inside most of the day and it is just best to limit my exposure while I can.

Hopefully, Molly will be well behaved tomorrow because she will be home alone for a few hours. There is a fall festival at a nearby Native American site that we are planning on checking out. The web page says it will be going on rain or shine. Today would have been a better day to go weather wise but tomorrow is better schedule wise for all who are making the trip. I am sure my mom will check in on her too.

 

 

Morning Contemplation

I’m writing this on a Tuesday morning before getting ready for work. I have a new coffee mug that states “Mornings are for Coffee and contemplation”.  It is actually from the Netflix show Stranger Things, but I have wanted one ever since I saw a character drinking from it. Not because of the show but because I liked the mug. I like the show too of course, though I haven’t seen the second season yet. I am waiting to watch it with my eldest child and teenagers rarely have time for moms.

Anyway, I am rambling about the wrong thing. What I wanted to ramble about is the tree in my neighbor’s yard. The reason I like my new mug is that it reminds me to set aside time just to be, to sip a cup of coffee or tea and look around the world instead of just rushing through it. I am trying to be better at doing that.

So, I was sitting in my favorite chair with a hot cup of coffee and my front door wide open. The only light was from the door and the windows because I  wasn’t quite ready for artificial light yet. I heard the cicadas singing and there was a light breeze rustling the flag still attached to my porch from the 4th of July. I had the passing thought that these five minutes of my morning sound like the beginning of some sort of patriotic commercial or political ad campaign. Then I notice the gentle trembling of green leaves.

My across the street neighbor has a huge tree in her front yard that squirrels delight in. The wind this morning just teased its boughs while it was bathed in early sunlight. I waxed poetically inside my head about how pleasant the morning was and how nice it was to watch the oak tree across the street, and then promptly tripped over my own thoughts. Was the tree across the street an oak? Maybe it’s a maple?

I got up from my chair and moved to the door with my coffee so I could squint at the foliage, trying to make out a single leaf. The wind picked up just enough to toss a couple of yellowing small ones from a top branch. They twisted and danced as they fell to the ground, making it impossible for me to tell what they looked like. My morning contemplation has been filled with: “Is it a maple or an oak?”

I am pretty sure the tree is a oak. Maples around here aren’t usually so big. If it is a maple tree it is very old. I could just walk across the street and look but that feels too much like giving in.

Tired Brain

I worked a lot this weekend but not at my day job. I paid bills, ran errands, and wrote. I am tired but I am not complaining. I am just happy I was able to get some stuff done. I will probably go to bed after writing this though.

Some of the work I got done was on one of my works in progress. I managed to finish one entire section and make a good start on the next. I have plans to finish the entire book by mid September and have it edited and ready to release by the first week in October.

I stayed up too late last night so my thoughts aren’t currently not very coherent. I thought about putting off posting until tomorrow but I am trying to be good. I am a known procrastinator. My goal for this blog when I picked it back up after graduation was to post at least once a week. I started posting on Saturdays but that slowly transformed into Sundays. I have to stick to my schedule or I will fall back into old patterns. I want to stick to my schedule and actually make progress with my writing. Posting my blog on time is a tiny step in that direction.

Baking Failures and Family Reunions

Papaw, Granny, and Aunt Dixie

Today was my family reunion. I still feel drained from the interaction. Don’t get me wrong, my family is awesome and I love them, but I am an introvert by nature and being around a lot of people can be fatiguing.

My lack of coffee probably hasn’t helped. I haven’t had a single cup today, by accident not by plan. I woke up early around 4 A.M. for no apparent reason. Unable to go back to sleep, I read a book for a while, then it was time to get up. I had pumpkin bread to make and brownies to bake.

Normally I am good at baking. It is my thing. I usually stress back over the holidays. Today baking was not my thing. I tried. I really did. I also forgot to add one of the key ingredients to the bread, dropped an egg down the sink, splattered brownie batter all over my face, and then mixed the ingredients for the type of brownie I was trying to make in the wrong order; effectively making them look unedible. They actually tasted okay, they just looked bad. And I forgot to grease the pan so they stuck to the bottom and I ended up with brownie crumbs while trying to get them out.

I ended up taking store-bought lemon aid and a big bowl of grapes. I thought it was probably safer for all involved, considering I also absent-mindedly sat an oven mitt down on a hot stove burner and nearly caused a fire. Honestly, I am not usually so bad in the kitchen.

I did get to see many of my cousins and my Aunt Patsy. I have a ton of cousins. Some I haven’t seen in over a decade, others it has been a month or two. I enjoyed getting a chance to visit with them. I wish I could have stayed longer. However, my son decided to brave the reunion as well and quickly used up all of his socializing reserves. (He is high functioning autistic so his reserves run out even faster than mine.) Still, I had a good time. I hope to be able to visit with everyone again next year.

 

Just Tired

I am tired. I’ve been tired so long I am not sure what not tired feels like. I can tell you what tired feels like though.

Tired feels like words just out of reach so that there are large gaps when you speak as you try to grasp the word you want or simply remember what it is you are trying to say. Tired is feeling like your eyes are always half closed rusted portals too dry to creak open all the way. Tired feels like effort to breathe, effort to think, effort to stand, sit, or sleep.

Tire feels like slogging along in thick mud caked boots so that each step is heavier than the last. Tired feels like wanting to sleep but knowing that sleep doesn’t help and neither does coffee. Tired is a constant. Or maybe that is just what it feels like right now.

Back to School and Bad Days

I’ve had a couple of unpleasant days in a row.  An inability to sleep at night has caused me to oversleep the past couple of days. Which means I have woken up late and the dog didn’t get to go out to do her business on time. So I have quite literally woken up to shit for two days.

As you can imagine cleaning up such a mess isn’t something I want to do before coffee. However, it is necessary. It isn’t the dog’s fault.

I am not sure if it is this unpleasant chore that sets my mood for the day or the lack of proper sleep but I have definitely been a grouch. Fighting the crowds to get the kids ready for school hasn’t helped. My youngest is in middle school and on the autism spectrum. He is high functioning so when he is having a good day you can hardly tell. But he is always very particular about things

For example, he will only wear khakis and shirts with Sonic the Hedgehog on them to school. It is his self-imposed uniform. Finding Sonic the Hedgehog shirts, until recently, has been an issue all on its own. Finding them in his size is an even greater challenge. Fortunately, he has a grandmother on his dad’s side with an embroidery machine.

School starts tomorrow. I am as prepared as I can be. I will be up by five in the morning because I know that if I want him to school on time that is when I must begin the day. I had nightmares all last night about being late and losing things.

Today I am trying to relax. There is a Native American thing going on at a local park that I want to go to but I am honestly peopled out. I also don’t have money to spare. School supplies and fees took more than I was expecting and I have to come up with a new way to juggle bills.

Right now I am watching a documentary series called Underworld At War. It is all about crime in Britain during World War II. The second episode was an account of Neville Heath; a conman and killer. It also covered the thoughts and challenges facing a school girl named Daphne, who fought to get an education during the turbulent times and realize her dream of becoming a teacher.

The now-retired Headmistress read excerpts from the diary she

kept during 1940. She spoke of doing homework during air raids and by oil lamp. She mentioned the time a bomb went off just as her father opened a door and how the blast blew him back onto the stove.

It made me think about how valuable that once school girl’s diary is to history and how it now gives us a more complete picture of the era. Of course, that wasn’t why she kept her journal. She just used it to record her thoughts. She probably never intended to share those thoughts with anyone else.

Today we write blogs and share them with the world. We keep online journals that are accessible to people in countries we will probably never see. It is an immediate transfer of information on daily life.

My ramblings of a couple of bad days don’t hold a candle to watching your father get blown back by an enemy’s explosive device. The information I am sharing isn’t all that useful from my current standpoint. I share it anyway because it allows me to get thoughts and worries out of my own head. I doubt they will even be of any use to future generations, but it does make you pause to think. Daphne didn’t expect her words to hold much value either.