I had an interesting experience last night. I finished my word count for the day, I’d vacuumed the living room and put a load of laundry through the machines, and I didn’t have anything else needing my evening time for once.

So I got dinner and spent the rest of the evening watching movies (2001 and 2010, to be specific). And … it was really, REALLY hard for me to relax. I was comfortable, I had two cats sitting with me and a glass of pop at my side, and yet something in the back of my mind kept asking me why I was just sitting there? Shouldn’t I be knitting, or crocheting, or doing SOMETHING?

I think I have lost the ability to relax and do nothing. Assuming I ever had it in the first place, of course. But I am so used to multitasking even when I’m relaxing that the idea of just sitting there, watching a movie, and doing nothing else felt alien and weird and wrong.

I already know this isn’t good for me. I do need downtime where I can relax, recharge, and gather enthusiasm for the next day. But apparently I’m going to have to have a long talk with my subconscious before that can happen.

Had an extremely long appointment early this morning which meant that I got next to no sleep because my OCD brain kept waking me up to make sure I didn’t oversleep, staggered home afterwards and tried to take a nap but knew that Lyndon needed me to drive him to pick up his truck from the mechanic’s (turned out to be a broken wire attached to an important switch) so I couldn’t settle, Lyndon finally came in and asked me to take him to pick up his truck, at which point he discovered that his GPS wouldn’t give him instructions on how to get to the South Side Ballroom so that he could see BABYMETAL (Japanese heavy metal band fronted by three female performers) tonight.

So we both headed home to see if we could print out a map (which was not helpful) or rig up a mount for his phone (didn’t really work), and I finally said I would drive him because I’m much more familiar with Downtown Dallas, he’s been looking forward to this concert for months, and I didn’t want him to get lost and frustrated, give up, and come home.

And yes, I know the Ballroom is right off the intersection of I-35E and I-30 so why did we go through downtown? Because this was at the height of rush hour and the North Dallas Toll Road was bad enough. I did not want to be screaming out the window at perfect strangers as I tried to merge onto I-30 whilst figuring out how the hell to get onto Lamar.

All of this is to say that I have had one hell of a day, I am exhausted, still need to go back downtown to pick up Lyndon, and afterwards I am going to get well and truly smashed because man, I deserve it.

I have had better Augusts.

On 8/7 our downstairs AC unit went out hours after I got some rather unpleasant news (which I will not discuss at the moment—I’ll explain once I have more details) which pretty much kept us running around like headless chickens for the last three weeks. Repairing the AC unit is just not in the budget right now so we have two window units keeping downstairs tolerable (I am very, very grateful that temps have dropped back into double digits here in the clavicle of Texas), and I have had three meetings regarding The Unpleasant News and have three more to come.

If that wasn’t enough, last night Lyndon’s truck decided to crap out. We tried jump-starting it and putting in a new battery (which it needed anyway—the old one was leaking goo), neither of which worked. Lyndon can hotwire it so it’s not the starter motor. At this point we’re not sure what’s going on so he’s trying to research garages in the area in between calls, and once he makes his choice we’ll get it towed over there and let the Pros from Dover take a crack at it.

On the plus side this is the first time we’ve ever had serious trouble with the truck, and it’s 17 years old so that’s pretty damn good. On the minus side, we really didn’t need another expense right now. Last night he said, “We’re good people, right? We haven’t pissed anyone off, have we? So why is all of this happening to us at once?” I said I didn’t know why, but apparently five planets are retrograde right now so maybe that’s futzing with the ether.

So, yeah, things are a little hectic here in Casa Fletcher at the moment. If I owe you a project, you will get it. It will just take a little longer than I expected.

I’m not going to keep bitching about the heat because nobody needs to hear that and places like Phoenix have it worse, anyway.

I just wish I felt better. I have a metric buttload of things to do but yesterday I was so damn drained I begged off from making dinner, and today I’m waiting for some serrapeptase and decongestant to kick in so that my head stops feeling like a concrete balloon. On the plus side we have everything in-house that I need for dinner so I won’t have to run to the store for anything, which is nice, and once I swallow enough caffeine I’ll see about knocking out today’s word count. I actually wrote 3K yesterday, the first time I’ve hit my daily word count since May 14 of this year.