Fatigue

Suddenly, around 5:30 this evening, just when my boyfriend Brian was starting his newscast, It hit me.

Fatigue.

Not just tired, not just feelin’ the burn.

I mean, I was bone-achingly, irritably, eyes-burning, stomach-churning, my-legs-can’t-take-me-all-the-way-upstairs exhausted.

A few moments before, I was getting to that point in the evening where I start barking, “Stop that infernal racket!” at the children, who are so terrified of my wrath that they immediately continue banging on the pots with the wooden spoons while singing GOD BLESS AMERRRRRICAAAAAAAA at the top of their lungs.

If they pause at all, it will be to say something like, “But mommy, we need an audience!”

Oh. Well. By all means, please do continue to disregard the way my face is turning red, the disturbing way my eyeballs are beginning to protrude from my head and, should you see any steam curling out of my eardrums, please take it to mean that I am just that much excited by your outstanding use of the flat AND edge of the spoon on that damned pot.

Because I think too much inquiring minds want to know, I began questing back through the day for the Cause.

As is occasionally sometimes nearly always the case, I’ve simply got forty-seven things too many on my To Do List.

I have an amended tax form to file (I received a Miscellaneous Whatnot form two weeks after I filed) (we are owed an additional $1,000 from Uncle Sam, which is much better than having to return $1,000 to him I suppose except that on the whole, I’d rather have NEITHER be the case).

The same Project I was bitching about some time ago is still itching at me. But I can have courage because it is nearly done. Soon it will be somebody else’s problem for a while. I only hope we will still be friends after this thing is put to bed.

I have a massive donation to pull together for the Veterans, who are coming next week. (The Veterans are coming! The Veterans are coming!) There is a pile of clothing and Whatnots assembled on the rocking chair in my room, which gives the entire room a feeling of clutter that irks me.

Also, there are files all over my bedroom floor. Files reaching as far back as 1996. Ah, the memories! I’ve found financial statements from the height of the Really Stupid Years! Good times, yessir, goooooood times…(Although I have to say, it is making me feel a lot better about my I Ain’t Going Into Debt For That stance on most non-essential things. Sometimes, I do feel kind of left out when other people, people relatively close to me, are doing downright idiotic things with their money while I’m refusing to spend money I actually could spend if I weren’t so uptight about things like college funds and early retirement.)

I was talked into babysitting a four year old (brother to Eldest’s Best Friend Forever, who is rapidly turning into my fifth child) while his grandmother is away. He is cute as a bug, but he is also four. He talks constantly, and I can understand about every sixteenth word. I thought it was for about two weeks. I just learned Grandma is away for six months. There will have to be discussions, here.

Speaking of six months, guess how overdue for dental exams the children are?! I got my hokey dental benefits card last week, and today interviewed six local dentists who are “in network”. Mommy and Daddy will probably go to one of them. The Denizens, on the other hand, will be seeing their Very Expensive Pediatric Specialist dentist in a couple weeks. If I want the children tortured, I will do it myself thank you. There goes another $725. When is that tax rebate arriving, again…?

The entire Den is in need of a good cleaning. Which would be easier to do if there wasn’t a solid layer of crap all over every surface. The husband cleaned out the garage, which naturally means that a whack of stuff migrated into the house and is now watching me expectantly all day long – waiting for its new home, inside. Oy. Do you think he’d notice if I started sneaking it back out to the garage again…?

I fixed one (1) of the three (3) broken strings on my largest harp today. It has been so long since I did this that I was all dyslexic and dysfunctional and otherwise doin’ it wrong. There is this Certain Knot Thing that you do when putting a new string on a harp? And I used to be able to do them blindfolded in a dark restaurant while giving tourists from Minnesota detailed directions to the nearest BART station?

Yeah. Can’t do that any more. In fact, I couldn’t do it in bright sunlight with my full attention on the task at hand. I broke the string and was out of 0.025mm nylon but I knew I had another bag of strings…somewhere…and then it was twenty minutes of looking and OH CRAP, it was time to run a kid from Point A to Point B and now, at 10:00, I am remembering that I only did one (1) of three (3).

And one of them is the High C, which should have a red string. Feck . If I were a red 0.025mm string…where would I be?!

I need the strings fixed because I have lost my mind utterly agreed to play for some upcoming events. And, see, I need to fix the strings so that I can fix my performing, which at the moment is complete ass. Fortunately, the harp is a very forgiving instrument to play and honestly I have often wondered if I could just sit there and bang on random strings and still have people wandering up saying, “Oh, wow, that is just, so, like, beautiful and peaceful…you are sooooooo talented!”

Swear to God, someone actually said that while I was tuning the harp before a performance, and then asked me what the piece was called. I told him it was an original piece called Simple Arpeggios in C Minor. He believed me.

Meanwhile, it has been suggested that I could help ease a certain workflow issue for some folks who could surely use the help if I would consider working for a company on a purely hourly, as-you-can 1099 independent contractor basis. Now, I think we all know what happens next: Tama says she’s going to work just a little, maybe a few hours on weekends and three or four midweek.

And promptly begins pulling down 65 hour weeks.

Because she is incorrigible, can’t resist “easy” money, and definitely can’t ever seem to say, “I can’t, I have knitting to do.”

Which, by the way, I do. I finished the second sleeve on Lillehammer, which means that what I need to do now is set up my sewing machine, run a couple lines of stitches around where the sleeves are to be sewn in, then cut the steeks (eep!) and sew in the sleeves and then pick up the forty-eleven stitches around the neck and do that and then I’d be done with the sweater. Just in time for the temperatures to hit the 80s around here.

Naturally…I am working on a sock instead. Which has the marvelous quality of being fast knitting. I turned the heel on the first sock tonight while my boyfriend was being devilishly handsome and intelligent telling me about important things like the economy and maybe something about bowling. I don’t remember, really. I was too busy castigating myself for taking on way too many Things, again.

Film at eleven.