I may be nearing a breaking point...

So there has been a lot of stress this year (have I mentioned the roof is leaking now?) I realized this morning that I need to take some me time and run away or I'll snap.

Interested in the catalyst?

I decided I needed a sugar boost so I made waffles for breakfast. As I'm sitting down to eat, the dog barfs. I sat down to continue eating before the waffles got cold again (because they wouldn't microwave a 3rd time) and the thought going through my mind was "That's fantastic, now I have my gratitude thought for the day. I'm glad he threw up on the tile, it will be easier to clean than the carpet." Then it hit me that it's a sad day when my gratitude thought is where the beagle threw up.

It's a good thing one of my Christmas presents is classes at Needleplay - I'm going to hide there for 3 hours tomorrow and not think about anything but the way the fiber goes into the fabric.

Don't you just hate ...

the days when you're exhausted at the end but you can't point to one productive thing that got done during the day?
My mom would call them chicken days - They're days you ran around like a chicken with its head cut off, accomplishing nothing but exercise and frustration. A chicken day every now and then isn’t too bad, they usually contain a lot of small tasks that have been put off until someday and now someday is here. It’s when you get a month of chicken days that your ego and endurance take a hit. A full year of chicken days begins to hit your self esteem. In Ethics class we’ve been reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and it hit me that the most frustrating thing about chicken days is that they have no overlying meaning – they’re pointless days with no fruitful purpose. But when you sit down and ask the hard questions, they may have an underlying point. It’s just a matter of making the time to sit and ponder and contemplate and finding the connecting threads.
Or if the chicken days have been endless – just snap out of it. Find a meaning to your life, set goals to reach that meaning, eliminate the chicken actions, and concentrate on the meaningful things that bring you closer to your goals.

I thought my teenagers were more responsible...

As I'm walking out the door to teach my community school class, I tell the 14 year old "Don't forget to feed your father." Three hours later when I call home, my husband tells me that he's starved and he's asked the kids for dinner three times. The responses were "I'm not hungry." "Later, in a minute." and "Uh-huh, which resulted in a bowl of spoiled lettuce being put close enough to the bed to make him sick.

So when I got home with a Wendy's bag for the hubby, I told the kids that 9 pm was way too late for them to eat and (this is so old-fashioned) they could go to bed without supper. Maybe it will help them realize that they need to take better care of their dad when I'm not home.

What happens in a house with no cable or dish...

I live in a house with no cable TV. We read. I thought I would share this year's main Barnes and Noble receipt with everyone. Yes, that is 5 and 1/2 paperbacks long and I had to hit two other stores to get the missing books from the series. Strangely enough, only 3 or 4 of the entries on that receipt are mine, 2 were for charity, but all the rest are for the children. Yes, all those books are for the kids and they spent the rest of Christmas vacation reading (Most of it was Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's series for my 14 year old). Christmas vacation was a reading paradise when I was growing up. Aunts would be at the house so I was excused from a lot of the cleaning since they and my mom had control of the kitchen. This meant I had time to curl up behind the pine tree with the books I got for Christmas and devour them. It's wonderful to see my kids doing the same thing. Oh and for the record, this year Barnes and Noble paid me $74.32 to renew my membership - yes, it's a lot to spend on books but my kids are worth it.

Update on the husband's condition...

So today we saw the 3rd orthopaedic to look at my husband's ankle. The first one was in the ER but we couldn't followup with him since he's out of network and his office refused to make the appointment even though I told them I had out of network benefits. The in-network doctor looked at the CT radiology report and said that he didn't feel confident in treating the condition and sent us up to the University to work with an orthopaedic there. The new orthopedic loved the CT scan, can't believe that the bones are still in place (compound dislocation of the ankle - dislocated in 7 places, but no fractures). We had 3 doctors and 2 interns come in to look at him and the comment was made to one of the interns that this was probably the only time that he would see an injury like this. The end result is that DH is non-weight bearing until the beginning of March.