Winter funk

It occurs to me quite often that there is nothing wrong in my life. I have a very nice life, as I told my dietician earlier this week, when she was talking about how stress might be affecting my digestion. What stress, I said. 

There really is none. I have a very pleasant little life, I told her.

Of course, there are the litter boxes. (Note the attractive picture of a litter box. All the photos today are of things I should be doing.)

Do litter boxes count as stress? Today, Sunday, I decided that I was going to take it a little bit easy. I wasn't going to do everything that's part of my usual routine -- I was going to cut a few corners (including the litter boxes).

This is my usual morning routine:

1. Alarm goes off at 7 am (on the weekends it doesn't go off, but I often wake up around the same time). I get up (eventually), go to the bathroom, brush my teeth with water, and put the stupid rubber bands on my braces.
2. I go back to my room and get dressed. If there's time, I play Wordle and Connections -- otherwise I do them a little later.
3. At 7:30 I wake up the twins. On Wednesdays I wake them up at 8:30 and on the weekends I don't wake them up at all, but four days a week I wake them up at 7:30.
4. I make the tea, wait for the twins to come staggering out to the kitchen, fix them breakfast if they want any, and eventually get them off to school (they usually leave the house to catch the bus around 8:05). Once they leave, I watch the bus I think they've taken on the "Next Ride" app until it reaches their stop. I feel as though this will somehow keep them safe. (Teen B sometimes texts me to tell me if they are stuck in traffic, or if they took a Dash instead of a Skip.) They get to their stop around 8:20-8:25 and then walk the rest of the way to school, which starts at 8:35.
   
5. At 8:30 every day, regardless of what else has been going on, I feed the cats.
6. Once the cats are eating, I fix my cereal and leave it there to sit and get soggy (because of the stupid braces).
7. I put away the clean dishes from the night before.
8. I start a load of laundry. If I didn't manage to finish yesterday's load, I put that away first, then start a new load.
9. I do a 10-minute stretching video (my new thing).
10. I eat breakfast and take five pills (Metformin (2), Rosuvastatin, CoQ10, and either Vitamin D or Vitamin B complex -- I take Losartan and more Metformin after dinner).
11. I brush my teeth and put the stupid rubber bands back on.
    
12. I do the breakfast dishes and anything left over from the night before.
13. I either clean the litter boxes or I do a quick bathroom clean (I alternate between the two).
    

At that point, around 10 or 10:15, I'm ready to start the day for real, and I usually try to begin with cleaning, though after all those little tasks I've already done I usually don't want to. It varies. Sometimes I clean, sometimes I sit and play card games on my phone.

I've tried moving cleaning to the afternoon, and sometimes that works, but more often it just doesn't get done. It's better to do it in the morning and then I can say phew, that's over.

Today, it being Sunday, as I said above, I skipped some steps. For example, I didn't put away the clean dishes. And there they sit, still in the dishwasher, with some breakfast dishes and other miscellany on the counter above them.

I will have to put them away eventually.

Maybe soon.

Things I did do: I put on my bands, got dressed, fed the cats, made my breakfast, let it sit, ate my breakfast and took my pills, brushed my teeth and put the bands back on.

Then I took Teen B to Starbucks, because that's the special Sunday task. 

When we got home I started a load of the kids' laundry because they both wanted their sweatshirts washed before Monday.

And there's the laundry, sitting in the dryer. It's not actually ready to be put away yet -- I started the dryer up again to run another cycle. I don't know if it's the cold or what, but the dryer is not doing a great job of drying things these days. I have to run most loads twice, sometimes even three times.

It's impossible to have a calm, quiet Sunday. I shouldn't even try. I should try to have calm, quiet Tuesdays instead, something like that. But there are always things that have to be done on Tuesdays.

Sunday is homework day, and I've already done some homework with both boys. Teen A is reading 1984 by George Orwell for Language Arts, so we read some of that together and worked on answering some questions (he has to answer 13 out of 18 questions -- we did 3). It's interesting to re-read 1984 -- I don't think I've read it since I was in 10th grade and I've mostly forgotten it. But it definitely resonates differently in 2024 than it did in 1975/6. For instance, back then we were actually nervous that things might change substantially in the next 8 or 9 years. Now, the year 1984 is in the distant past -- but some of the things in the book are weirdly closer to coming true.

After Teen A's homework I took a break and went to both libraries (Main and George Reynolds) because there were books I wanted at both libraries. I'm currently reading four books at once (not a recommended reading strategy) and the last thing I needed were more library books. But there was a hold waiting for me and another book I decided I wanted to read by the end of the month, so...

Home again, now Teen B had math homework, and I've told him repeatedly that I don't remember enough about Algebra 2 to help him, but he keeps asking. Call Dad, I say, but he won't.

So I said, how about if I sit with you in the living room and read my book while you work on your math. He agreed to that plan, so I brought out Woodrow Wilson, my enormous biography that I'm on page 47 out of 675 pages.

He started working on a problem, said it was too hard, gave up, and stuffed the problem sheet back in his math folder. No, no, no, I said. Here, how can I help? I ended up not doing any reading, but instead calculating square roots and looking up cube roots and helping him read the instructions and we ALMOST got it done except that the last problem sort of threw us and he got mad and put it all back in the folder. But at least we made progress.

Unlike me with Woodrow Wilson. Wilson is a complicated president and I can already see that I'm going to have trouble with him. Such a racist, so sexist, but so intellectual, too.

So, just now I took a break and did some more homework with Teen A. Then I put away the clean dishes and did the breakfast dishes. It took me less than 10 minutes. I'm almost done with my "morning routine" (it's 6:35 pm). One thing I skipped was my 10-minute stretching video, which I've been enjoying doing all week. Kind of a stupid thing to skip, since I like it, but I was determined not to do everything on my list.

Here is something else that I didn't do today. Officially we leave our tree up until February 2nd, but I really feel like it's time to take it down. I took all the ornaments off last week, so it's just the lights and the tree itself and the cloths underneath. It wouldn't take me very long to get it all put away. Maybe I'll do it this week. There are two issues.

1. I like having the lights in the evening -- it makes a pretty glow. The kids like it too, and in fact Teen B complains when I don't turn it on.
2. HOWEVER, Baby Kitty likes the taste of the tree and keeps chewing on it. Also, he has discovered that candy canes are fun, and keeps climbing the tree to look for the few that are left.
   

So, it'll be sad to lose the lights, but it's probably time to take the tree down.

But not today.

This blog post has been mainly an attempt to convince myself that I have an easy, non-stressful life and that I should therefore not be depressed. But, as we all know, depression has nothing (or almost nothing) to do with what's actually going on in one's life. I mean, it can -- if someone dies, you can get depressed about that -- and of course money problems are depressing, and problems with friends and loved ones... but none of that is really happening to me right now. I'm just in a funk and there's no getting away from it until it's ready to leave.

Phooey.

Last night the phone rang (the home phone) and I checked the caller ID in the kitchen and it was Rocket Boy's brother. About half the time when Ralph calls I don't answer, but the other half of the time I do, so I answered. He just wanted to chat for a few minutes. We talked about his trip to the grocery store that day and about the cold. He seems to mainly like to talk to me about food. He tells me what he bought at the store and we tell each other what we're going to have for dinner that night. I'm not very interested in food, but at least it's easy to talk about.

After a while I said I had to go and he's always fine with that, even if I can't think of an excuse (which I couldn't yesterday). And when I had hung up I did what I usually do, which is to sigh and say, oh Ralph, honestly. Or maybe it was oh god, Ralph. Something like that. It's an expression of exasperation that I have to have these conversations, as well as a comment on how odd they are.

And then I had this little epiphany. I thought, who are you kidding. Ralph is exactly who you should be talking to. Rocket Boy has a number of sort of odd friends (a certain manic Norwegian comes to mind), and while my friends tend to be more normal, I think it's true that I often end up talking to people who other people might not want to talk to. And I'm comfortable with that. I'm a little odd too. So is Rocket Boy.

It was a moment of revelation. Embrace who you are, I thought. Claim your people, don't reject them.

I thought that realization might cheer me up today, but it hasn't.

Tomorrow, Monday, I will try to get back on track, do my stretching video, clean the litter boxes, follow my whole routine. My day of relaxation was OK, but it'll feel better to go back to my normal, pleasant, non-stressful life.