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Bummin’

July 7, 2002

My Sunday evening depression has come early this weekend. The wonderful start of the weekend feeling, when the hours stretch out before me, just waiting to be shaped by my hand, is long gone. I look my to do list, then I look at the clock, and I’m discouraged. Sure, I’ve gotten a fair bit done already this weekend, what with having had Friday off. Do laundry, work out Friday, quilt inner borders, change sheets, finish unpacking, finish BTSATM (see updated books page), clean toilets, process new fabric, grocery shop, and library are all crossed off the to do list I wrote Friday morning, and I got started but not finished with quilt outer borders and put away laundry, too. Not bad. But there’s a lot left on the list, and only one day to do it in. I’m tired. I don’t want to work out again. I don’t like the way the border quilting is turning out—too wobbly, seems misaligned and too small in the outer borders and too wide and open in the inner borders—but I’m not willing to rip it all out and start over. I want to just veg out in front of the tv and tear stuff out of magazines. That’s not on the list.

Twelve hours from now, I should be in bed. Twelve hours to work out, quilt outer borders, put away laundry, read companion book for BTSATM, go through mail (I have to gather it all up in one place first), draft book club questions (I’m leading the discussion this month), and e-mail updated directions to the friend coming over on Thursday now that I’ve realized that one of the streets I told her to come on will probably be blocked off for a weekend festival. Is it possible? I guess so. But I don’t see a lot of downtime in there, and I want downtime. And regular maintenance isn’t on the list—preparing and eating three meals, feeding Bubba, showering—so that cuts into the time available, too. Plus there’s the cleaning I need to do between now and Thursday; whatever doesn’t get done today will have to be done after work during the week, when I’ve got other things to do. Gah.

Part of the problem is I don’t have a good idea how long some of these things take. Putting away laundry is something I always put off because it seems overwhelming—all that sorting and folding and getting things back in the right places (and I don’t even do Mr. Karen’s shirts and pants; he does those himself once I stack them all together). When I get around to doing it, though, it doesn’t really take that long, yet I can’t seem to remember that and every week put it off because I don’t want to take the time. One week I experimented with putting away each load as it was done, and that was pretty slick, since the big piles of clean stuff never got built up, but that’s another thing I can’t seem to remember, how nice that was. Anyway, the point was that maybe if I knew how long the stuff on my list will take, I could see that I will have time to veg and might not be so bummed. Maybe I should keep track, actually jot down how long each thing takes. But that might seem too much like work, where I have to log all my time. I don’t want home to be like work, even though work is much better than it was in years past. Yet if I don’t do something different at home, I fear every weekend will bring this gloomy feeling of not getting enough done.

Enough whining. Now I’m down to eleven and a half hours before bed. Surely I can salvage some of that time, not give it all over to moping. I’m tempted to self-medicate with food, but that’s a bad idea. I was 163 for yesterday’s weigh-in, almost back to my pre-vacation weight, and I don’t want to head in the wrong direction again. Just gotta pull myself together. Compared to so many other people, I have a cushy life, so this bumming myself out is really unbecoming. Maybe someday I’ll be able to stop doing it. Like next year, when I’m thin and organized. Right.

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