So Blue

I am struggling today.  My jaw feels like lead. It would hang slack if I would let it.   I just want to sleep.

For the last three nights, I have fallen into bed and into a sleep without dreams.  I wake up seven hours later, feeling exhausted.  Chuck falls asleep just as quickly.  I know this sounds silly, but I really need the few minutes that we lie in bed at night and talk before we fall asleep.  We usually laugh about something and poke each other and act like idiots.  Trivial, I know.  But without that, and without a kiss good-night, I wake up in the morning feeling like I’ve been in bed with a stranger. 

The rain is bucketing down.  The streetlights are on.  We are out of firewood.  Chuck has turned off the furnace for the year.  The house was 61 degrees when the kids and I left this morning and there is no prospect of any sun to warm it for days.  There is some wood in the ravine, cut but not gathered in last year because it was green and needed to season anyway.  If I want fire tonight, I will have to don rain gear and get that fucking wood out of the ravine and get it split.

I got my period five days early. 

I weighed myself this morning.  I gained another pound.  That’s three pounds in three weeks, despite loads of exercise and the careful eating.  I am now the heaviest I have been in my life.

I could not hold my plank position this weekend. I pulled a groin muscle doing an exercise that I have done uneventfully many times. 

I ache all over from the intensity of my workouts.  I tried to run today, but I just couldn’t stand it:  the sore muscles;  the rain, forcing me to run inside when I would have preferred to be outside;  the stupid music on my stupid iPod, which I haven’t changed since 2010 and won’t have the money to change until God KNOWS when?  I left the track in disgust after about ten minutes.

Scarlett got out of her cage on Friday and spent most of the day chewing on stuff while Chuck and I were out.  She climbed onto my buffet and chewed it as well.  I have a lot of cheap pine furniture, but the buffet was different:  the one nice piece I got to take from my old life.  Both Scarlett and Tobi have chewed on my cheap pine furniture and I have been mildly annoyed, but I must admit that I cried over the buffet.

There is no Internet, and I don’t think there will BE any Internet.  We are into the sixth week without access.  At the end of February, Digis had a person climb one of their towers and slightly adjust one antenna to get a superior signal for 2300 East.  When that antenna was adjusted, Wasatch Resorts lost everything.  We have begged and pleaded and yelled and shouted and they will not move the antenna back.  There is no other Internet provider that serves our little neighborhood. 

The real estate agent sent me some more listings.  I need to look at them with Chuck, except getting him, me and an Internet signal all in the same place at the same time seems to be an insurmountable task.  And we are back to my terror of buying a house and losing my shirt in the process. 

Last month, Sara’s computer was on the fritz.  This month it’s Nathan’s.  His is kaput and he blithely assumes that his dad and I will replace it without batting an eye.

Thanks to sequestration, I have to Cut, my budget, which has been cut every year since 2009.

Here at my work-station, my keyboard tray is held onto its under-the-desk brackets with a bullfrog clamp and a bent paper clip.  Or it WAS, until someone who doesn’t realize how fragile it is didn’t handle it properly. Now, I jam it into its brackets and hold it in position with my knee. I get my knee to the right height by propping it on the ankle of my other foot. 

I wonder if there is another job for me out there somewhere?  One where the answer isn’t forever “No” and the keyboard tray doesn’t drop into my lap? 

On NPR the other day, they mentioned the national median income.  I earn significantly less than that.  Here I am with a master’s degree and a job that requires multiple skills and a hell of a lot of responsibility; and I am pinching pennies every month.  Car registration.  Propane.  Computer virus.  Taxes.  Savings goals.  I realize that I’m lucky to be able to save toward a goal at all.  And I also realize that I am where I am because of the choices I made.  I am still enough of a wienie that I want to buy myself a new toenail color.  Or some new tunes for my iPod.  Except I can’t access iTunes, anyway. 

Hey!  The streetlights have gone off.  Things are looking up.