When I began writing a blog post every day as a part of Nablopomo, National Blog Posting Month, to join the celebration of Nablopomo officially becoming a part of BlogHer I knew it would be tough, but I had no idea how much extra stress I would be under. Why do we women always think we can do more than is humanly possible?
I will have accomplished something spectacular by following through with 30 posts in 30 days. I have also worked on a lot of other events, projects, and “things,” and it isn’t over yet. I have about two weeks of sheer insanity left and then the simple hectic rush of the Holidays will begin, and “No, this extra craziness I’m talking about isn’t part of the Holiday hustle and bustle.”
A Partial Menu of Stuff on My Plate
- My husband is on sabbatical and spending lots of time at home working on grants and other writing projects – mainly smack dab in the middle of our family space: with the laptop on the couch or at the kitchen table – now that he is back from his travels to several East Coast Universities during the first half of the the semester.
- I’ve been working on rearranging some of our financial concerns including a home refinance that rolls in a second mortgage that we had to take out when I moved across the country to take care of my mother as she was dying at the same time my daughter was graduating from High School and starting college. (Things do happen in clumps don’t they?) The appraisal required a tidy enough house to see the floors and walls that had been hidden by boxes of my daughter’s accumulated stuff from college that needs “going through” before we can pitch or sell the contents.
- My daughter moved back in with us this fall during her last semester of college. The car she had been using decided to die, so we also shared a car this semester. She also has a female 110 lb. Dogue de Bordeaux living here with her as well as our Neo Mastiff, a 160 lb. male, and our 60 lb. hyperactive rescue mixed breed. Yes, there is dog drool everywhere in our house, including the ceilings and high enough on walls that it takes a step ladder to get to them to wipe them down. (Two mastiffs ago I repainted the entire interior of our house with semi-gloss paint. We also have two cats. (Do I even need to say that the dogs and cats do not get along?) There is also my daughter’s aquatic turtle with his very large aquarium. Our male dog is intact. Her female dog was in heat all November.
- My daughter will graduate from university in mid-year ceremonies mid-December. We are trying to arrange all the graduation basics, plus a wonderful reception afterwards. Relatives are coming from the East Coast. My daughter is also applying to graduate schools with January deadlines on all paperwork, retaking her GREs, and getting ready to move to Minneapolis in early January.
- Did I mention we helping her buy a car this week?
- Oh, and I don’t think I mentioned that the east coasters who will be arriving are my step-daughter, her one-year-old twin daughters, and her husband who lost a leg in a boating accident this past summer? No shit sherlock, it has been an absolutely incredible year.
- This fall I’m also supposed to be finishing up my memoir that deals with a lot of the medical child abuse I experienced as a child and how I have continued to heal to a remarkable degree throughout my life. (No stress there! – Yes, I’m seeing my therapist while remembering and writing.)
- I’ve been neglecting my friends, and amassing huge vats of guilt that I’m lugging around like Scrooge’s night visitor, one who lost her home in foreclosure and is now Occupying Tucson and my childhood best friend whose husband just had bypass surgery, a stroke, and a very bad reaction to morphine?
- Step-daughter’s birthday is two days before Christmas, daughter’s birthday is just after the New Year.
- My dear husband and daughter told me tonight, as I melted into a simpering mass of babbling mush on the floor, that they want to have a garage sale the weekend between finals and graduation.
Blogging every day may have kept me sane this month. Now I just have to make sure that all the posts that I wrote and posted here or on my other blogs or on BlogHer show up here on this site as blog posts too and are labelled Nablopomo. And there are some that I posted here that I wanted to cross post on my other sites, but somehow I didn’t get them cross-posted.
Thank Heavens that next year is coming soon. I can’t wait!