I think it’s time to throw in the towel and admit defeat on this round of Camp Nanowrimo. I haven’t had the time or energy to write in a solid week, and I don’t think I’m doing my book any favors by trying to force a daily word quota. I think it would be better served by sticking to my “at least 30 minutes a day” goal and remembering that a little progress is better than no progress.
So what’s been keeping me so busy for the last week? Taxes and tragedies, pet trauma and illness and vet appointments, scrambling to wrap up projects so I can get paid and to find new clients and projects to replace the ones I’m finishing, weather woes, prayer and reflection and Bible study, and a lot of just sitting here feeling numb and hugging on my husband and furbabies and wondering what the world is coming to. And tea. Lots of brewing and imbibing of tea.
The entire week has been stressful and surreal, starting last Thursday when I ended up spending the entire day going over my accounting records and making sure everything was in order, thanks to procrastinating on it for an entire year. Friday was all errands and making up for the freelance work I skipped on Thursday.
Saturday started out with accidentally sitting on my tiny dog, who was sleeping under a blanket on the couch. He wasn’t seriously injured, but he was sore and pretty sore with me for a while, and I of course felt like a horrible human being and pet mom. Saturday was also doing our taxes day, which we elected to do ourselves this year to save about a hundred dollars by using Turbotax instead of a professional tax preparer, and let me tell you, that extra hundred dollars to let somebody else who knows what they’re doing do all of the paperwork while you just sit there is well worth it if you can afford it. And between having underpaid my 2012 estimated self-employment taxes and having to pay back a portion of our first-time homebuyer’s credit from 2008, we owed quite a bit more than we expected to, and Sunday was figuring out what to do about that, along with housework and yard work.
Monday was when it took a turn for the surreal and tragic, which I’m sure you well know. We had just gotten home from a morning spent running tax-related errands about half an hour before the first tweets from Boston started circulating, and like pretty much everyone else I spent the rest of the day in shock and failed to get much else done. Tuesday was Sasha’s vet checkup, and we also took Pete for his annual and to have him looked over to make sure we hadn’t missed any hidden injuries from Saturday’s incident, and it was also a day of trying to catch up on client work. Wednesday, yesterday, was all about client work, and, not having slept well the last two nights, I was very tired and ready for bed when we finally turned in.
And yet, I was not so tired that the storms didn’t keep me awake, which meant I was up to hear the tornado sirens go off around midnight. I got up and ran into the living room to turn on the TV and check the weather to see if I needed to wake Matt up and take cover (I didn’t – the worst of it was well south of us) and spent the next hour on the floor in front of the TV watching the radar and praying for all of the Tulsa suburbs in the path of a tornado and making sure that we were out of danger. Finally, they gave the all-clear for the city of Tulsa proper, and I turned off the TV and went back to bed. And the tornado sirens continued to blow for another hour or so after that. My nerves, they were wracked.
This morning, I awoke to the news that the tornado had touched down again in some small towns to the east, but thankfully, nobody was seriously injured, although some folks, including the son of a friend of mine, lost their homes. I also saw the news about what’s happening in Texas, and I think that, on top of everything else this past week, is what finally broke my brain. I have work I need to do, but I have not slept well for the last three or four nights, and I’m very tired, and I’m very sad, and I just want to sit here and curl up with a cup of tea and my dog (who loves me again, although he jumps down from the couch when he sees me coming) and look at pretty things on Pinterest and maybe get off the computer and go make something pretty with my own two hands.
But: I have work to do, and my clients need their websites, and I need to get paid, and I need to find my focus and get it done. I will take a moment to count my blessings, because I know I have so much to be thankful for, make another cup of tea, go kiss my husband, and get to work.