Welcome, October

I am so happy it's October! I didn't realize how much I was looking forward to the month until it was almost here. It has always been my favorite month, I always enjoy it, but this year I guess I just really needed a lift, and here comes October to provide it. Lovely cool weather, beautiful fall color popping up all around the neighborhood, and a ready-made theme to plan the month around. 

I love themes. Maybe it is because I am not naturally creative that I like to have a framework to organize my life. Or maybe, thinking more positively, it is just that my creativity flows better within a frame. Whichever it is, themes make me happy. It occurred to me that the lack of themes in March through September may encourage me to be more depressed during that time. Also the weather.

Here is the year as I see it:

• October: Halloween month, appropriate for reading spooky books, wearing spider earrings with a lot of black clothes, and filling the house and yard with pumpkins, real and decorative.
  
• November: Thanksgiving and Election month, lends itself to patriotic activities like reading Presidential biographies, voting, and making apple pie.
• December: Christmas month, 'nuff said.
• January: Cold month, appropriate for making soup and baking, sleeping under piles of blankets, and going for walks in bleak, snowy landscapes.
• February: Valentine's month, appropriate for eating fancy chocolate, reading Barbara Pym books and love stories, and wearing pink and red and purple...
  
• March: not really spring, not fully winter, basically very depressing month during which time I also have to put on the twins' birthday parties and plan/execute Spring Break.
• April: usually Easter, but complicated by the fact that Easter moves around, it could easily snow, and I hate all the mess of hardboiling and then dying eggs, oh, and HIDING eggs. Partially redeemed by the large number of jellybeans available for general consumption.
  
• May: End of school, which has both happy and sad aspects, beginning of summer, weather still unsettled, kind of emotionally stressful...
• June: Officially summer, though it could be hot, could be cold. Enhanced by trips to the nursery, planting the green things obtained there, and watching them grow.
  
• July: My birthday month plus 4th of July, I should enjoy it, but basically this month is just HOT. Try to have a good time, but mostly sweat.
• August: Still really hot, dry, everything looks dusty and worn out, school starts but it always seems too early...
• September: Traditional start to school but of course we've been going for ages already, still hot, waiting for the heat to break, waiting for time to pass...
• October again!
  

If I could come up with a positive theme for months like April, May, and August, maybe I would enjoy them more.

Anyway, it's October and my depression has lifted a little. There's still this underlying sadness, but every time I feel sad, I think about the fact that it's October, and that helps. I have started reading a book about witches, and even though it is not the best book I've ever read, the subject matter feels entirely appropriate. Plus, I have this huge stack of other spooky books waiting for me to read them. I've decided I don't want to buy the book group book this month (we're reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and it doesn't sound good at all) so I put a hold on it at the library and I am #85 out of 95! Even though the library owns 84 copies, I don't think I'll have to read that thing for a LONG time. My hope is that it will become available about two days before the book group meets (on October 25th, here).

Also, today I took the kids to Starbucks for a treat and I had a Pumpkin Spice Latte. Everything seems better in the context of a Pumpkin Spice Latte.

We celebrated Sillers' 4th birthday this week, as planned. I think she likes the new Etsy cover for her dog bed a lot. It's so soft and so pink. She actually prefers to sleep on my bed or on the loveseat in the kids' room (because it gets a lot of morning sun), but in the evening she can often be found on the dog bed.

I was going to make her a cake, even bought new cake flour at the grocery store (and threw out the old cake flour which had an expiration date of 2014 on it -- scary!), but I also had to make a pot of soup that day, and by the time the soup was made, I didn't feel like making a cake. 

So I buzzed off to Safeway and found a lovely fall-decorated (white) cake and we had that. I gave Sillers a tiny piece, and she and Merlin inspected it, maybe even licked it, I'm not sure, but they didn't eat it. Cats do not like cake.

I admit I did look up recipes for cat birthday cakes on the internet, but they all contained tuna and I didn't want a tuna cake in the house. Besides, the cats do not need to gain any weight. So a real cake was better, not that the human inhabitants need to gain any weight either. Actually, Teen B is holding steady at five feet tall and 90 pounds, so he probably does need to gain some weight (so he can grow). And Teen A is a little taller every time I measure him, so he can handle the calories too. I, on the other hand, have indeed started to gain my weight back, just as I had feared. Compared to early January, I am down 15 pounds, but a few weeks ago I was down 18 pounds. Not being nauseated anymore is taking its toll. I mean, it's great not to be nauseated, don't get me wrong. But it means I have to think about my weight again, about what I'm eating. Who wants to do that?

One exciting thing that happened this week was that I vacuumed. With the newly repaired vacuum cleaner. And oh, what an amazing experience that was. It was like watching a commercial for vacuum cleaners. I turned on the vacuum, ran it over one of the little rugs we have by the front door, and the dirt disappeared -- like magic! I tried it on another little rug -- same thing happened. It was a miracle! I went all over the house, vacuuming up dirt. I was near tears. 

You have to understand that vacuuming had become a huge chore for us, because it took so long to vacuum anything. We'd have to go back and forth, over and over and over the same spot, until the rug MAYBE looked a little better. And then move on to the next rug. It took forever, with very poor results. And this bad vacuum cleaner behavior developed so gradually, over so many years (the vacuum is at least 20 years old, because it predates my living in this house), that I didn't realize it needed fixing.

So now I'm wondering -- how often should I vacuum? Because now it's so easy, I can do it quite often, but how often is normal? How often do most people vacuum?

I decided that once a week would be a good frequency, and I also decided that I should have a vacuuming day each week. And then I started to wonder whether it would be good to have a cleaning chore assigned to each day. I already do the twins' laundry on Sunday -- that probably seems sacrilegious to some people, but I find that it is a very good day to do laundry because it means the twins are set with clean clothes for the week. I have to do two loads, but that's OK, I can handle it. The twins wear eight pieces of clothing most days, for a total of 112 pieces a week, except that Teen B actually wears six pieces of clothing three of those days, so it's actually 106 pieces total, plus I throw in Teen B's cloth mask and both of their sweatshirts, which divides almost perfectly into two large loads of laundry. (If you're wondering, they each wear 1 shirt, 1 pair of shorts, 1 pair of undies, 2 socks, 1 pair of 2-piece pajamas, and 1 pair of nighttime undies (a habit which we can't get them to break; we also can't convince them that shorts could be worn more than once before washing, ditto pajamas) every day.) Three days a week (unless it is snowing), Teen B wears flip flops instead of shoes, so he doesn't need socks, but the other four days he has PE, so he has to wear shoes and socks.

So, what should I do the other days? After some thought, I came up with this schedule:

• Monday: pick up clutter that has accumulated around the house
  
• Tuesday: dusting (we have some serious cobwebs)
  
• Wednesday: bathroom (some aspect of it)
  
• Thursday: trash, recycling, compost (in preparation for pickup on Friday)
• Friday: vacuuming
• Saturday: free day
  
• Sunday: laundry
  

There are other things that could be on the list, but they are harder to schedule. Grocery shopping, for instance. I often go on Tuesday, but sometimes it's Monday, sometimes it's Wednesday, and sometimes I have to go again on Thursday or Friday. Hard to put in a schedule. And some things need to happen every day or every other day: cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the litter boxes.

I am going to try this for the month of October and see if I can follow it. The idea is that I would spend no more than half an hour on each task each day. I realize that normal people clean their bathroom(s) every week, but since I happily go months without cleaning ours, it would be a big deal to clean one aspect of it each week.

Another plan I made for October is to work on the files for half an hour each weekday. I started working on the files several weeks ago and then just stopped, basically horrified by the task. So I decided that if I worked on it 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, I would make some progress. I started on Friday -- it was painful, but after 30 minutes the timer rang, and I got to stop. It was OK. So I'm going to try that again this week.

All these cleaning plans are related to the fact that Rocket Boy is planning his next visit -- though I'm not sure just when it will be. I want him to come for three weeks in November, but he thought he should also come in October, since he hasn't been here since July. He needs to have a crown replaced, so he might as well connect these visits to us with dental appointments. So he called our dentist on Friday, left a message, and we'll find out this coming week when the dentist can see him and arrange a plane flight or two accordingly. 

The cleaning plans are also related to my attempts at Time Management, based on the two books I read a couple of weeks ago. I have continued making a Done list each day, much more helpful than a To-Do list, but I find that it's also helpful to write three or four things that I want to get done that day on the side of the list, so I don't forget them. These aren't aspirational things, they're things that really need to get done that day, like grocery shopping or picking up Teen A at school for his orthodontist appointment. I am also continuing to refer to my Master To-Do list, both to cross things off and to add to it.

So maybe it's all of that that's making me feel better -- feeling a little more in control of everything and not so overwhelmed. Or maybe it's because it's October. Or maybe it's just the internal cycle that my moods follow, up and down, up and down. It makes me wonder yet again if I might in fact be bipolar (I think the preferred terminology these days is "have bipolar illness"), like my mother and other members of the family. It would certainly not be surprising, though no therapist that I have ever seen has thought I did. If I do have bipolar, it would presumably be bipolar II, or even cyclothymia, since I have never had a manic episode of the sort my mother used to have. I also don't usually have truly deep depressions. I can always function, even if I'm feeling down.

When my mother got manic, she used to plan all sorts of things -- parties, projects -- that she was unable to complete when she fell back into the depressed state. Is making cleaning plans equivalent to that? I often make such plans and then fail to follow through. I think that has more to do with the fact that I don't like to clean than mental illness, but I don't know. I know that as a general rule I hesitate to make big plans that I won't be able to carry out later, because I know the depression is always going to come around again -- but if I were actually manic or hypomanic I probably wouldn't hesitate. Right?

I do know I don't want to go see a psychiatrist and start taking some sort of awful bipolar medication. I'd rather have my highs and lows. If I had the kind of highs and lows my mother did, it would be different. 

This week I happened to read an article in the New York Times about Seasonal Affective Disorder and I was startled by how much its early signs resembled how I was feeling.

It tends to start with so-called “vegetative symptoms”: an increased appetite and a craving for carbohydrates like french fries or ice cream, the urge to sleep longer hours, difficulty getting up in the morning and feeling wiped out at work.

Then, in three to four weeks, “the mood plummets,” said Michael Terman...

Vegetative symptoms. Do vegetables crave carbs and sleep a lot? And is it possible to show both vegetative and hypomanic symptoms? Wouldn't the two cancel each other out? I'm so confused.

Well, I've run out of this week's photos of fall color (and hawks, and stormy skies, and pumpkins, and loaded apple trees), so that must mean the blog post should come to an end. I'll just say again, I'm so pleased that it's October. I have fun tasks ahead: decorating the house (which for me mainly means getting out all my little Barbie dolls in Halloween costumes), sending a few Halloween cards (not nearly as many as I used to send, but a few -- I bought them already, they're just sitting here waiting to be sent), and reading all those lovely books. And Rocket Boy's visit -- I hope! I've really missed him. Even though I'll have to do some extra cleaning beforehand, I'd really like to see him. Hope it's soon.