This week, we’ve thrown Best Practice by the wayside and have embraced the wine on school nights – and it has proved quite comforting indeed. I had planned to run after work today, but I was too exhausted and it was all dark and unpleasant when I arrived home.

We can get back to health when the week is over.

This evening I have been adding articles from givemesomethingtoread.com to instapaper so I might download a bundle to read on kindle-y when I take to my bed in the not-too-distant-future.

Thank TheUniverse for cabcharge!

Fortunately, contrary to normal Monday evening practice, Don acquired wine.

Reader, is it any wonder that I married him?

• ran/shuffled the usual 2.5km route … IN THE MORNING (first time ever)!
• walked the (7.5km!) round trip to Rozelle with my lovely husband, to do a walk-by of a haus, visit the essential ingredient and grab a quick pub lunch. Despite sunscreen acquired sun-burn
• folded tons of laundry
• re-covered the wheat heat-packs and sewed new, removable (hello kitty) flanelette covers for same. If you don’t have a wheat heat-pack or two, you should run to the chemist NOW – they are genius!
  
  snuggly hello kitty

• made 2 lots of pizza dough for (what turned out to be tremendous!) salami and ham pizzas for dinner
  
  quite excellent pizza – ignore the cooking detritus in the background

• cooked minestrone alla milanese for lunches this week
  
  healthy! and inexpensive!

• began gathering together the materials for totes for our new yoga mats (so tired of using the mats at the studio – they smell like very stinky feet)
• ironed handkerchiefs (just about the only thing which is ironed in this haus)
• put new sheets on the bed
• drank wine
• barely gave a thought to the horrendous week ahead at SML

I was forced to abandon any thoughts of yoga, resort to painkillers and hope sleep would take care of it – which, fortunately after some time, it mostly did. I now have a dull ache behind the left eye, but this is infinitely preferable to the agonising and endless stabbing and twisting of the imaginary knife of earlier in the day.

I’ve been pondering the cause of my newly-acquired headache collection. Was this the culmination of the week of headache? Do I need to wear my reading glasses more? Take more vitamins? Be more hydrated?

Most everyone has been all, “well, duh, you’re extremely stressed”.

These clever people are right, I am indeed stressed to the proverbials.

I have an enormous amount on at SML and a good deal to organise for Joe/Frank’s special provisions application for his HSC exams – all of it quite time-dependent.

On reflection, this stress also might go some way to explaining my extreme forgettery and not that I am developing early onset dementia (as a palm-reader at Paddington Markets told me was my destiny many, many years ago and which has, stupidly, preyed on my mind ever since).

I’m hoping April will see an improvement. Meanwhile, this weekend, I decided to embrace distraction as a de-stressing mechanism and have been cooking up a storm.

When we were oh-so-close to moving into not-meant-to-be-ours-haus, we pretty much cleared the freezer of emergency dinner supplies. We’re now re-building the stash and organising future lunches with cuban black bean soup and little chicken and vegetable pot pies (unblogged, but I daresay I have a photograph lurking somewhere from the eatin’365 project)

Tomorrow is minestrone alla milanese and a whole lot of sewing.

And, thus far, I do actually feel a little better (as long as I make an effort to live in the moment and not thinking of the week ahead).

Sadly, I had to take the new and improved campering supplies down to the garage until our next opportunity. While there I managed to snap the comparison shot.

tent-v-tent

Easy to see why we changed allegiance.

One of our ActionItems for this non-camping weekend involves putting the love tent (and the double stretcher) on gumtree. We’ll take a loss, but it should more than cover the new, minimalist, purchases – which we might get to enjoy, if it ever stops raining.

On Wednesday we acquired our new, much more suitable tent and air-mattress, gathered camping foods from the supermarket and then became quite despondent upon hearing that there will now be extremely heavy rain and flooding across most of NSW (at least that within camping distance).

We briefly considered pushing ahead with the trip, but then had a flash of sensibility – especially when we recalled tales of people being stuck in trees or washed away while camping in flood plains and how we rolled our eyes with a “idiots! what were they thinking?”¹.

Next available option is in a month, let us hope the weather eases off a smidge.

Meanwhile, the weekend will be full of cooking, sewing and bunkering down.

I once (or twice) read an utterly, wonderfully perfect description of such a headache, but alas, the source now seems to be lost in the dim, dark recesses of my brain.

I want to say that it was Ruth Rendell, but I am quite convinced it was not. This is the problem with my memory being less sharp, tidbits that were once so close to the surface are now quite forgotten – would that my headache were so.

Clearly I am not made to live in a hot climate – though I am happy to visit them for the occasional week or two, as long as the air conditioning is plentiful.

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Meanwhile, in craft …

I am all about the cable management, and most of the cords in the haus have been managed by being prettily wrapped in velcro cable ties or elastic bands. Unfortunately, velcro is rather dissatisfying – amongst its many unattractive qualities it is scratchy and sticks to everything it shouldn’t. Elastic bands are also not great, they tend to disintegrate when exposed to light/air for even a moderate length of time.

So I hit upon the idea of hair-ties for cable management, these did not disintegrate or stick to things, but they were a little difficult to remove, so not great for managing headphones or similar cables which require regular unwrapping.

Not sure what prompted that “ah ha” moment, but I thought it might be worthwhile trying to combine the hair-ties with my extensive collection of buttons.

$5.00 for a couple of packets of hair-ties and a whole lot of buttons later, we have dozens of:

It has been wildly successful!

Pretty much every possible cable in the haus is now successfully managed thusly. Even large bunches of cables can be managed by piggy-backing the ties. Velcro begone!

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This week is possibly the most stressful, ridiculously busy week I will face at SML until the EOFY (though there may be leakage into next week).

I have very little time to think, and so I have realised that, though it would be an elegant solution, I am particularly terrible at keeping lists on my phone.

To manage this I acquired a very nice blank book today to keep in my giant-expensive-namesake bag to help me record my thoughts and the things I need to do.

I was prompted to write things down after attending a course last week where I became horrifyingly aware that I have extreme difficulty spelling when using pen and paper. How the hell could I misspell Buddha? How did this happen?

Anyway, the book, it is pretty and I have written things in it and crossed them out in a satisfying fashion after I have actioned¹ them.

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¹Actioned: I know you love the word.

And I took my vitamins last night, and I ate a decent breakfast at home, rather than resorting to the occasional mid-morning apple at work as my first food of the day.

It is all about the baby-steps.

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This morning we decided, all impromptu-like, that we’d go camping in the not-too-distant future. We’re super-jazzed at the prospect, even if it is just an overnight.

We’ve also decided that the Arabian-love-tent must go. At 18kg and with enormous bag to contain it, it is far, far too large for GerryScotti (and far to heavy for us to lug about a campsite with any sort of ease) and with it must also go the double stretcher – completely impractical (and also way too large).

I have no idea what the hell we were thinking.

Arabian-love-tent

I think both the tent and stretcher really have prevented us from getting out amongst it more, they are such a hassle to pack and take up so much room in the car that it became a major production and not the “hey, let’s pack the car and go” carefree getaways that we’d envisaged.

Lesson learned (and more money to spend!)

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And I blogged!

I’ve always prided myself on my fabulously excellent memory and my ability to get things done. Right now none of these things are working for me, I’m forgetting all manner of stuff (both of the facts and the to do kind) and some of what I do manage to accomplish is nowhere near the extremely high standard I ordinarily set for myself.

I blame extreme SML-work-overload, Don votes for increasing age.

Whatever the cause, it is ridiculously unpleasant and as of yesterday, I’m taking to writing everything down as it occurs to me. This has made me realise how many, many things must occur to me as I have filled two pages of an exercise book already. Worrisome, as I used to manage this all in my head without issue.

Worst of all, I appear to have lost my bloggering mojo. I take photographs and compose fragments in my head but don’t seem to be able to bring myself to follow through.

I have resolved that the coming week will be about trying to claw back some semblance of normality.

I will blog something insignificant every day, I will take my vitamins (I’ve made a chart), I will eat a healthy breakfast (also, chart), I will exercise for at least 10 minutes, I will focus on the task at hand and not worry about the avalanche of work about to engulf me.