I hope I can get a post up tonight. My technology is acting up. I think it's the internet connection that is my problem right now. Everything I try to do online is freezing up, and this is a long-running issue with the company whose name I won't say, but it rhymes with SmenturyFink. I was chased upstairs when my satellite box overheated and shut off, in the middle of Talking Dead. I'm not even sure I'll attach a photo tonight, not wanting to take up more zeroes and ones than my bandwidth can accommodate right now. Maybe just one.
I didn't mean to get fixated on one project today, but now that it's mostly done, I'm glad I did. I had decided it was time to pull out the chairs where we spend most of our time, so I could vacuum under them and wipe down the baseboards along the wall behind them. I thought it would take just a few minutes. Three hours later, after I'd scrubbed the heat register with a magic eraser, vacuumed every inch of the room (including the underside of my rocker), removed all of the debris from the side table and wiped it down with furniture oil, dusted all of the tchatchkis, and filled the trash can, I was exhausted but feeling like I had really done something special. I stopped feeling the overwhelming urge to keep a perfectly neat house when I came to terms with my diagnosis a year ago, even though I had struggled with ever attaining that level of perfection my whole life. I just decided that I wasn't going to pretend I could get there anymore, and my stress level has gone down as my dust level has gone up. But I still don't have the ability to put up with mess for too long, and even if it wears me out, it is worth a deep cleaning now and then. I'm less itchy now, and definitely less twitchy about it all. I still have a few papers and cat toys littering the piano, but otherwise, the room is good enough that I wouldn't be embarrassed if some acquaintances dropped by (friends already have seen the place messy).
I'm trying to meet a deadline, and I'm finding it hard. I procrastinated reading through the Grannie Annie stories a second time, and my recommendations are due tomorrow. I'm halfway through my re-reads. Of the ten I've commented on so far, only two have merited being sent up the food chain for consideration. I seem to recall there was one more at the bottom of the list that might be worthy, but I'm trying to do this in order. It's hard to make negative evaluations, even on my own hand-written notes. I feel like these kids made an attempt, and I don't want to crap all over it. But my volunteer job is to separate the wheat from the chaff (yes, even a gluten-free freak like me gets to use that analogy), so I have to do what I promised to do. I just don't want to crush any kid's dream of being published. I think I would hate to see what someone in a similar position would think of my writing, if it were buried in a batch of twenty stories like this.
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