I spent most of last week at the lake at HP's rental cottage, the third time he's been so wonderfully generous as to let me use it after the end of the commercial rental season. I knew I needed a break--I've taken a few days off here and there but generally ended up using them to cram for midterms/finals, not just relaxing. So I did my best to try to do that last week.
I didn't realize until late in the week just how much I'd withdrawn over the last three months or so. I make friends easily and have tons of them, but am now aware of how poor a job I've made of being a friend lately. I owe several people apologies for being out of touch. The tank was almost completely empty, though...just getting through the day and getting everything done was as much as I could muster, and there wasn't a lot left for anything social.
Spending six days near the water, getting ten hours of sleep a night, reading a book that had nothing to do with school (and starting another), rediscovering knitting, and just sitting still in a seat that was not in front of a desk or a steering wheel were exactly, precisely what I needed. I came home able to look at the total body of things to do in front of me and identify what to attack first, then next, then next, and on and on. For someone who lives by lists, this sounds ridiculous, I know--but making a list and actually prioritizing it in a way that gets the majority of the items done and allows the non-critical crap to drop off until the next day/next week? A skill I'd forgotten in the crush of trying to get EVERYTHING done, EVERY day, PERFECTLY. Once I stepped back and realized a) I'm never going to finish every list every day, b) not everything on the list is high-priority, and c) there is definitely no way I will ever be in the same galaxy as perfection, everything started making sense again.
Don't go more than nine months without taking at least three days off to do absolutely nothing. It's not healthy. You'll just piss off your friends and eat yourself alive.
I've been thinking for a few months now that having a pet again would be kind of nice (not that Survivor isn't a nice pet, but fish, as a rule, don't cuddle). I'd go back and forth...I've gotten used to not having cat hair follow me in a cloud wherever I go, but up until six months or so ago, I was still on the lookout to make sure Duke didn't get out when I was opening the door. Having the bed to myself is nice, but not nice enough to keep my feet warm. Having weekend company made the silence in the house even louder during the week. I began to pay more and more attention to the weekend morning news segment on the Pet of the Week at the SPCA. I knew that a dog was out of the question--I'm not home enough, which is unfair to the dog--but a cat was not.
Last week, a co-worker posted a want ad on our company intranet looking for a home for a female cat. Turns out that the cat, Olivia, was her grandmother's, and while her cousin had taken her in, Olivia was very used to being an only cat, and wasn't getting along with the cousin's dog and other cat. After a couple of days of private hemming and hawing, I said to TDML that I was going to get in touch with the co-worker and see if she'd found Olivia a home yet. TDML was very encouraging (her words were along the lines of, "It is about damn time, woman"), and so I emailed the co-worker. At that time I was second in line--someone else had expressed interest and was asking a family member about it--so while I waited to hear, TDML and I went to Target and I spent fifty bucks on new gear and food. Since my mind was made up, if things didn't work out with Olivia, I planned on taking mommasnarx on a trip to the SPCA to see if there were any viable candidates.
I contacted the co-worker on Friday and the other person who had expressed interest hadn't heard back from the family member, and said that if I was definite, I should take Olivia.
So I did.
Within five minutes of bringing her in the house, she was purring and beginning to explore, her tail swishing from side to side. I don't think she's been upstairs yet, but I haven't been either since I brought her home this morning (have I mentioned lately how much I love having a bathroom downstairs, thank you yet again SBJ?). I left her alone for a while to go to lunch with mommasnarx, and then brought her back to meet Olivia, who was charming. We've spent most of the day on the sofa otherwise; she wants to be where I am (though she lets me go to the bathroom in peace), but doesn't need to be on top of me. She spent a while checking in for some pets and then exploring a little more, tail going the whole time. Finally, at about 3:30 she climbed up next to me (with an "oof!" of effort like Sawyer used to make; girlfriend is chunky) and settled down and went to sleep.
I do believe we're going to do just fine, Olivia and I.
Lesson to me...always write posts offline. Typepad's online compose editor is a big bag of dicks (I said I was trying to clean up my vocabulary. That phrase is a vast improvement over my normal vernacular.)
The post I had written expressed concern about the state of my brain, and repeated a story about a conversation with GG and TDML about said concern last week...I told them about driving in to work on Friday (via DMV to drop off Floyd's plates so that my license wouldn't be suspended when his insurance ended, the bank to augment the six cents that were in my wallet, the mechanic so he could meet and inspect the Blue Streak, and Dunkin' Donuts to redeem the coupon for the free pound of coffee that the Red Cross gave blood donors in January before it expired that day) and listening to the Streak's lovely CD player (there was then a digression about having graduated to an actual CD player in the car, instead of a Discman-to-cassette adapter, and a further digression about being too cheap to buy the integrated SiriusXM receiver and choosing to live with a tangle of wires that fortunately is hidden in the armrest) when "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" came on, a song to which I have known every. word. since I was nine years old.
Then I dropped down a paragraph, just like I did here, and said:
I forgot half the lines and ended up murbling every verse at least once.
Then I defined "murble" as the sound you make when you're singing at the top of your lungs and realize that you've screwed up the lyrics, and try to correct mid-word--it's neither a vowel nor a consonant, but a murble. Murbles are sung.
So then I went back to the story, because that was, after all, most of the point of the post that I am now recreating even though I should be going to bed. I said to GG and TDML that I was thinking that I was going to schedule an Alzheimer's screening and start shopping for an assisted-living facility while I still cared whether or not it smelled like urine and sour milk. As the conversation went on, it came up that I'm studying for my accounting midterm, was planning my part of our group paper in Strategic Management, am behind on getting two estimates and a detailed project schedule done at work, and am in the throes of memorizing four songs to which I'm singing backup for our company band at a Red Cross fundraiser in March (and then I think I went off on a tangent about not being able to read music or hear any one particular element of a song, such as, oh, the HARMONY, which means that I have to memorize what I need to sing, though the words, "What is Hip?" are not difficult--it's more the when to chime in that's an issue).
The punch line, when I finally arrived there, was that both GG and TDML pointed out that perhaps my brain is just full, or tired, rather than rotting from the inside out. (It shouldn't actually be rotting, now that I think about it, because I do my best to preserve it with alcohol on the weekends.)
Then I put in a picture of the Streak that's actually out of date, because she now has license plates and has been driven 660 miles in one week.
Right about then, Typepad shit the bed went toes-up on me.
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