Clawing my way to the end of the school year
This has been one of those years. We had a long-standing medical emergency boil over in November (and then another one start last month when I shattered my shoulder, because what could be better than having bicycling cripple me?), and ever since that point I’ve been chopping my day up into 2-3 hour segments and trying to get things done inside those segments. Wake up at 6 in the morning, shuffle the bears off to school, then try to make use of the 3 hours before I start retrieving them from school. And then it’s 4pm, and there’s only a couple of hours to dinner, and then only a couple of hours until bed, and then the whole thing starts over again.
Sadly, this whole “couple of hours” thing is deadly to my ability to work. It reliably takes me about 2 hours to warm myself up to the point where I can sit down and either code and/or sew and/or weld (I can, sometimes, just hop on the bike and burn away some of that time, but on cold and/or rainy mornings it’s really hard to drag myself out the door unless I’ve got a scheduled event going down that I need to be at at a particular time.) And so I spend about 2 hours warming myself up, and whoops! my time is up.
Chop chop chop chop chop, and the week is done. The only time I have free is the weekends, and I’ve been trying to get out for longish loops on Saturday and do household errands on Sunday. Which means that Saturday is really the only long interval of time I’ve got that lets me unwind the increasingly huge knots of stress and fretfulness over the work I’m increasingly finding it unable to do.
Needless to say, self-medicating by bike riding is not the most reliable way to relieve stress – if a loop doesn’t work out, or isn’t pleasant (both of which have happened this year) that just adds another layer of unhappiness to the big ball of tension, and then that’s even more stuff I need to try to unwind when I’m warming myself up in these countless 2 hour chunks of time between wake/delivery/pickup/dinner/sleep. And then all of the stuff I need to do just piles up deeper and deeper.
But, fortunately, the goddamn school year ends in three days and I’ll (at least theoretically) have longer stretches of time where I can warm up, then sit down, fire up the sewing machine/computer/torch and make things. (They won’t actually pay anything, but I’m unemployed and the only income I’ve got is the just barely over minimum wage job known as “looking for work and collecting unemployment,” which, fortunately, is about to run out of money so I won’t have to pretend that I have even the slightest interest in doing coding anymore.) And, who knows, once I get the chance to sit down and make things, maybe my loathing for the computer industry will subside.
Three days. That’s all I need. If I can keep from breaking down for three days I can start work on the dozen or so things that have stopped completely dead in the last six months. And maybe that will get me above water before this whole carnival of despair starts again in the fall.