I’m Posting, Okay?

I’m having, like, blogger-block. Last night I was writing a post about our vacation and it was just too much for me. I wasn’t up for it. This is the problem when I don’t write. When I get started again, I feel like it needs to be high-quality and fabulous, which is pretty much paralyzing. And it’s ridiculous, because often the posts that I work on the most will disappear into the ether, floating among the chirping crickets, and then I’ll knock off a couple of sentences and someone will gush praise to me. Or I will whine about something and I’ll get bunches of comments. Sure, they’re pity comments. But–if you don’t blog you don’t know this, so I feel compelled to tell you–we always want comments, even the pity comments. Okay, no. Not the mean comments, which hurt my feelings way more than they should, considering that I’m in my 40s and should have a healthy self-esteem,  etc.

I procrastinated all day yesterday, but it was surprisingly easy, because I had one of those days when everything I do takes exponentially longer than I ever thought that it possibly could. For example, my drive to take J to gymnastics, which I thought would take me 20 minutes, took me more than 45 minutes.

It’s hard for me to write when I feel like my house is in chaos, and it’s felt like chaos since we arrived home on Saturday. While we were away, we’d hired a teenager to cat-sit Isis. She’d feed her in the morning, then let her out of the house, then feed her and corral her back in for the night. Halfway through our vacation I noticed that the catsitter had texted me, saying that she was suffering from a stomach bug, and could I please have my neighbor check on Isis? Of course she’d texted me first thing in the morning, and I am locally renowned for not noticing texts. I’m sorry. I’m not a phone person. Apparently all of these people always have their phone within arm’s reach, ears tuned in for little chimes, but I am not one of them. So poor Isis had spent the day inside raging at the injustice of her world. I knew she wasn’t starving (tons of dried food) or thirsty (ever-refilling water container that I hide separate from her water dish, because I am that paranoid), but perhaps she was emotionally traumatized. I emailed our neighbors, who jumped into action with enthusiastic and surprising swiftness (thank you again), and there were enough reinforcements that I believe it’s possible that Isis was accidentally fed three meals at one point. So she was fine. But the point of this long tangent is that she felt it was necessary to punish me by making a supreme mess of . . . something from one or the other end of her digestive tract that would wait by desk ball-chair thing as a boobie trap when I got home.

Also while we were gone, our contractors were finishing up re-doing the girls’ bathroom. We expected that it would be completely finished when we arrived home, but we’d accidentally forgotten to buy a toilet seat (did you realize that they sell the toilets and the seats separately? We did: we just forgot), and the faucet we’d bought was a teensy one, like we needed for our teensy vanity in the master bathroom, but we should have had a spread-out, handles-separate-from-spigot faucet for the vanity in the girls’ room.  They didn’t want to “bother” us over vacation by contacting us to let us know, and I’m mildly bitter because I’d much rather have been bothered over vacation and come home to a completed bathroom instead of a work in progress.

So. The point of all that is that in addition to the normal unpacking and laundry stuff, there was some massive steam cleaning to be done, more home-improvement errands, and a bathroom that still isn’t settled. All of which makes me cranky. And all of which feels much more pressing than writing anything. And there’s more chaos hither and yon.

For example, currently I can’t close my wallet due to excessive loyalty/discount/gift cards:

Am I the only one with this problem? I feel like a scatterbrained slob with stuff like this.

So whole days will go by with me doing things like grocery shopping and putting never-grow-mold-on-your-shower spray into the new shower and driving kids here, there, and everywhere, and next thing you know it’s late. Some of my best posting is usually at night, and now that it’s summer the kids have relaxed bedtimes, which I support. I mean, it’s summer. But it’s hard to clock out when they’re roaming.

I’ve been in a shame spiral about my lack of blogginess. And I know that this post is a whiny one. But I’ve got to (re)start somewhere. So here it is. I’m back on the wagon, people.