I’m posting some long newsy entries for people who are interested in what’s going on in my life. If you’re not one of those people, you won’t miss anything by skipping these.
On Monday, October 27, I wrote in my journal, “The stress is really starting to get to me.” Between the thing that resolved on the 28th, the election, my aunt visiting, everything I was doing for Pub-U and all my own work that wasn’t getting done, I was pretty much on the verge. I was lying awake at night stressing and waking up early with anxiety fits. Every time I’d get past an event or resolve an issue, I couldn’t feel any relief because there were still more big things looming ahead. The newspapers and my e-mail were backing up unread and I wasn’t getting to any of my writing and editing work.
The laundry cost me $335 that week. The drain for the laundry room and kitchen sink runs off into a “dry well” next to the house–that’s no longer legal but the house was built in 1954 and this is a rural town. That drain has been slow for a very long time, and I always had to watch the washing machine and catch the overflow in a bucket when I ran a load of laundry. This was a nuisance, but no more than that, and I was putting off dealing with it. I don’t like to use chemical drain cleaners, especially not with the dry well. Many years ago I had that pipe cleared by a plumber, but at another time the pipe got clogged when I washed a disintegrating rug, and it eventually cleared itself.
But I was doing extra washing as part of the fall cleaning, and something finally clogged the pipe completely. I had a roaring flood in the laundry room (probably not as much of a disaster as it would be in your house), had to turn off the washing machine, and I called Roto-rooter. (I tried a local plumber first but he didn’t even answer the phone.) The Roto-rooter guy came and opened up the dry well, which I never even realized you could do. I’m not sure I wanted to know that when I’m hanging the laundry on the line outside, I’m standing right over a big brick-lined hole full of water, covered with an unsealed concrete disk! Shades of the well in Mortal Touch! But the not-so-dry well was not the problem, so the Roto-rooter guy cleared the drain and now it’s running perfectly. That’s what I get for procrastinating so long on dealing with it!
On Tuesday the 28th, I did a New Moon ritual.
On Wednesday, my dad and my aunt were due for dinner at 4:45pm. They were going straight out to a movie afterwards, so we planned dinner early. Well, they ended up arriving a half-hour late, because my aunt wanted to bring flowers and they were held up at the florist. I was actually getting quite concerned, and dinner got rather overdone. We had a pleasant meal, but they were here for 90 minutes and zoom, off to their movie.
By this point, I was heavily involved in designing the Program Book for Publishing University, and it was time-consuming. I did all the design for Pub-U, including a two-sided postcard, the web page design elements and the Program Book. I spent Halloween doing mostly that, and decided to squeeze in my formal Samhain observance at the astrological cross-quarter, 8:11 p.m. on November 6th. I spent some time filling in a multiple-page online form to be a program presenter for Arisia in January, because that was due by the 31st.
My dad asked me to come up and watch the Patriots game with him, his friend Ty and my aunt on Sunday, November 2nd. I also said I would cook dad another pot of this bean soup he loves (and which is a sneaky way of getting some vegetables into him 🙂 ). That’s all that I remember discussing–in fact, I’m sure that I said I would only come up if I got enough work out of the way. I was stressing over the Program Book because I had to wait for last-minute information, it had to get to the printers in a certain time frame, I wasn’t going to be at Pub-U early enough on Friday to deliver it, and I wanted to get my Samhain observance in. As usual, everything was piling up at the same time. Generally, I feel quite refreshed by the change back to Standard Time, and it barely even registered with me this year.
I cooked the bean soup and went up to my dad’s at game time on Sunday–and somehow they had gotten the idea that I was “bringing dinner” and had been waiting for me! No one called me to ask where I was, and I sure didn’t remember agreeing to bring the soup for everyone to have for dinner on Sunday! So I got there and just felt embarrassed because everyone was waiting for me and I hadn’t had a clue. Anyway, people ate and then Ty and dad and I watched the game. But my aunt stayed in the guest bedroom by herself watching her own TV shows almost the entire time I was there. I put all kinds of effort into getting together with my aunt twice during her visit and I barely even saw her! I got trumped by a movie and her TV shows that she can’t bear to miss. Sheesh.