If I start completely over, I won’t be behind…

OK, new theory: Let’s pretend that I just now started this whole “life” thing. That way, I’m not behind, I’m just getting started!

Huh? Huh? Whaddya think?! I know! It’s like, brilliant!

Sigh.

Yeah. I’m so far behind right now I sincerely doubt I can ever catch up. Right now it feels as though all I get for my sixteen hour days is a kind of drowning more slowly sort of survival.

It irks me just a tiny bit because it feels like whenever I just go and have fun for a day or two, the payback is…unfair.

I mean, really. Other people manage to have actual vacations without there seeming to be much in the way of and now, you’ll have to work 23 hour days for the rest of the week to catch up on the flipside…but I take two measly days to mostly-not-work, and it’s like, OK! And NOW, you get to spend the rest of your life working double-time to make up for all the stuff you DIDN’T do those two days!

(I know it’s self-inflicted. I’m enjoying a nice pity party right now. So shut up and eat a stupid cookie. Have some tea. It’s special “energy, concentration and focus” tea all the way from China(town).)

Saturday, I hauled my sorry backside out of bed early, patted everybody on the head, said, “See you later!” in cheerful, I am SO out of here! WITHOUT you!! tones and hied myself to the junior livestock auction at the San Joaquin County Fair.

It was a gas. I’ll tell you all about it later – for now, I’ll just reveal that a 219 pound hog and a 1,112 pound steer were purchased by yours truly from a pair of beautiful children that were not mine, but that I wanted to bundle up and take home with me anyway except that I’m pretty sure their parents wanted to keep them, which is too bad for me but understandable seeing as how they were the kind of bright-eyed, sensible, feet-on-ground, beautiful young ladies every mom prays their own kid will be, when she’s a teenager.

These two purchases mean that in a couple weeks here, I’m going to get a phone call from Fagundes Meats and Catering to please come and pick up my 550(ish) pounds of beef, and 140(ish) pounds of pork, bacon and ham.

By the way, if you live near Manteca, California and want to get in on some excellent meats at decent prices – go and check out their meat packs. They do an excellent job with their cutting and packing, it all comes neatly packaged in freezer-and-recipe friendly sizes, they’ll carry it out to your car for you, and they don’t mind customizing your mix (within reason, of course – I mean, I’m not going to ask them to swap me 10 pounds of ground beef for ten pounds of choice strip steak) if, say, you absolutely are not ever in a million years going to eat the beef ribs and would rather have an extra couple pounds of ground beef or bacon.

(Fagundes isn’t paying me for this, nor did they ask me to endorse them. I was told recently that I need to say such things whenever I mention a business on my blog or else the FCC will come and arrest me or something. Because I’m sure the FCC is a regular reader of my blog, on account of it being all mainstream and edgy and such.)

The husband brought the Denizens (plus two of their friends) a few hours later, when the fair opened. I’d bought everybody the discount tickets for the fair itself and the carnival wristbands the week before, so the kids ran themselves ragged going from ride to ride to ride.

Also, those kids ate, I kid you not, almost a hundred dollars worth of fair “food.”

Not food. “Food.” Deep-fried lard with sugar sprinkles, that’s what it really was. But, you know, hey. It runs once a year for five crummy days. We’re not likely going to be doing another one until the Bean Festival, and that’s a much smaller festival that doesn’t have endless culinary sinning opportunities.

The most fun of all (for me, anyway) was when we went to look at the exhibits, because Eldest had entered some of her art. Her fine art got one red and one white ribbon (because obviously the judges were blind and wouldn’t know Amazing if it walked up and bit them on the shin) (what? I’m not biased, that’s my purely scientific opinion, based on my zero knowledge of what constitutes “art” and spoken from the firm ground of complete ignorance), while both of her earrings got blue!

Proud momma: Check!

Also, I had to do my annual, “Where are all the knitters out here? There’s hardly any knitting at all in this show! I totally should have entered {favorite knitted object of the year}! Ooooh, look how neatly she did the pickup on that border, that’s awfully nice work…cute, cute, hideous, sweet, oh, nice hem, yeah, next year, I’m totally going to make {insane feat of knitting} and enter it…” routine.

It’s tradition, people. (I missed entering Lillehammer by one day this year. ONE. DAY. Due Saturday, remembered that on Sunday. And what makes that particularly ironic is that I had nagged Eldest half to death on Friday to get her stuff in because the deadline was tomorrow, Eldest, don’t you DARE do your space cadet number and not get your stuff in!)

And then Sunday…it was an actual day off. Our babysitter arrived promptly at 11:00, and the husband and I went into San Francisco to see Wicked.

Do you know it was our first “date” in over a year? I mean, obviously we get a lot of time together. We have lunch together just about every single day at work, and we commute together, and work, like, twenty feet from each other – it’s not like we get plenty of “alone-ish” time with each other.

But it’s seldom at all romantic. Commuting? Not romantic. Slamming lunch between meetings? Not romantic. The conversations we’re usually having along the way? So not romantic?

Oh baby, discussing the laundry situation is sooooooo sexy! Kiss me, you fool!!

It felt downright weird to be sitting in a theater with him, watching a musical, no kids around, both of us slightly dressed up (but not all crazy-dressed-up because it was just a matinee)…we got cocktails in the theater, too, because this was one of those no expense barred sort of things for us.

I know. We are wild things. We followed that up by pulling through Carl’s Jr. for dinner. AND WE GOT COMBOS. Lookout, they’re living HIGH tonight!

Usually, when I take a long weekend off work, it’s all about, well, work. Catching up around the house or garden, canning stuff, doing Spring cleaning or special projects that need more than the single weekend day I can generally spare (if and only if I’ve made a super-concerted effort throughout the week to have everything ELSE already done when Saturday morning rolls around). Filling out paperwork for our dormant-but-still-alive business. Shopping, cooking, organizing.

I thought that I’d be able to get everything done with “just” Friday and Monday and part of today, followed by working a half-day from home so that I could mop up whatever I hadn’t actually finished previously (by which I actually mean, “rinsing and washing the dyeing I did this morning”).

I was so wrong. I’m up to my eyebrows in stuff I haven’t finished yet, and frustrated outside of all telling.

And yet, at the same time, so unwilling to give up. Because stubborn? I haz it.

In spades. I’m going to do this self-sufficiency thing to the absolute best of my ability, whether it’s easy or not.

I only wish I had about, oh, 9.85 more acres to work with out here.

I’d be cookin’ with gas then, baby…(or cooking, at least, because guess who still can’t remember she really needs to wear sunscreen if she’s going to get out there in the garden…?)