Our weekend promises to be very busy.  In fact, so busy that we’re going to start it tomorrow instead of Saturday.

I’ll tell you all about it after it’s over.

Today, I refrained from crawling back under the covers and instead, went to Macy’s.  They were having their One-Day Sale, which they have pretty much every other week, but I was lured by the idea of bargains and boots.  I did not find boots, but I found bargains.  Just in case you were wondering.

Tomorrow, I need to resist the urge to crawl back under the covers because I have a small load of stuff to drop off at Value Village.  Then I plan to deliver a shelf-thing to a friend who has agreed to accept it.  I just have too much stuff and a really busy weekend planned.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, an American Girl catalog came in the mail and instead of throwing it away as I have every other time it appeared, I offered to 8-year old Grace.  She spent the rest of  the afternoon and the entire evening studying the pages, marking up the most important things with check marks and circles and noting on other things, “whatever you think.”  Once she saw the Bitty Babies, she decided she’d rather have one of those instead of an American Girl doll.  She loves, loves, loves babies, just as I did at her age.

Tonight, I ordered a toilet and a kitchen sink.

Tomorrow, my three boys are getting haircuts.  Trims, really.  They are all long-haired and not parent-approved.

I really need to make dental appointments and an eye-doctor appointment.  Maybe I will remember to do so tomorrow.

The forecast calls for possible snow.

The skies are dark by 5 p.m.

Thanksgiving is next week.  NEXT WEEK!

That is all.

You would not believe the wreckage that is my family room.

This happened, apparently, while I was busy removing all the magnets from my refrigerator and cleaning out my junk drawer and delivering boxes to the storage unit.

Also?  If this feeling in my head is another cold, I will be so mad because Friday I am flying to Texas with my children to visit my in-laws (and my husband who is flying in to meet us).

That is all.

So, I’m working tonight and my twelve-year old come rushing past, muttering something about the toilet overflowing.  “I need towels!”

I said, “Wait.  The toilet is overflowing?  What does that mean?  The water is still rising?  Or . . . ?”

“The water is rising!” he said rather frantically.

I ran upstairs to find water flowing over the toilet bowl.  I splashed across the floor–vinyl now, rather than carpet–and plunged the toilet until the water stopped gushing.

My son appeared with pool towels and every bath towel in the house and I threw the towels into the puddle, the pond, the lake that had formed in the bathroom.

So.  That was fun.

At least the ceiling hasn’t yet been fixed from the last time we had a catastrophic water emergency.

I’ve lost my stickiness.

I’m like a sticker that has been stuck on and pulled off and then covered with lint.  No longer sticky.

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I feel so unmoored, so disconnected from anything solid.

What is disheartening is that as I’m drifting to the horizon, no one seems to notice that I’m floating away.

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In other news, today I assembled a desk, yelled at my kids, ate more than one candy bar, took a nap, worked eight hours, and considered crying but found I didn’t have the energy to do so.

Tomorrow is another day.

I have an old piano with an old decrepit bench.  The fabric had worn away and the children had picked at the deteriorating foam cushion and finally I had enough.

A few days ago I bought a slab of foam at Fred Meyer.

Today I bought a length of fabric at Value Village.

Tonight, I pried old staples and fabric from the wood.  I glued the foam on the board, then stapled on an old towel.  I topped that with the new fabric and then spent some time puzzling over the empty staple gun, retrieving more staples and then wondering why I couldn’t get the staples to discharge from the staple gun.  I did not curse or stab myself with a screwdriver or drive a staple into my eyeball.

Eventually, I prevailed.

I stapled the fabric on the board and finished the whole thing with the backing fabric.

So it looks better.

I also filled some half-filled paint cans with kitty litter so I can dispose of them.

I know!  You wish your life were this full of excitement!

The end.

I wondered this afternoon if I will ever do anything again besides pack and clean, sort and purge, organize and rearrange.

I also thought how strange it is to live in limbo.  I feel myself withdrawing emotionally from my community and I’m not sure what to do about that.  I have no energy to care very much about it because I’m too busy deciding what can be donated to Value Village and what needs to be packed into a box.

I did manage today to finally move the extra moving boxes into the storage room so my living room looks more like a living room and less like a U-Haul truck.

That makes up for yesterday which felt like one-hundred percent work and yielded paltry results.  I was at the soccer field at 8:20 a.m. and the streetlights were still on.  My daughter’s team lost badly.

We went home and I went straight back to bed which was kind of awesome.  My toes thawed by the time I got up again.  A family friend took my two youngest kids to a movie, so while they were gone I ran some errands.  When we were all home again, I had to leave to pick up my teenagers.

Anyway, so the weekend’s over.

I wish we could get an extra hour of sleep every night.

I feel so accomplished today.  Not only did I drop off a sturdy metal filing cabinet and a cheap wooden microwave stand at Value Village, but I also located a place willing to take my old dead computer and gigantic monitor.

I researched the issue online and found this particular computer shop that recycles old computers and monitors and had to laugh at the extremely geeky and young employees.  They were a sitcom stereotype of the kind of smart twentysomething nerds who understand the inner workings of computers.  And I do mean that in the nicest way possible.

Anyway, I was happy to fork over $17 to be rid of the electronics.  Some Facebook friends informed me that there are easier and free (!) ways to unburden yourself of dead computers and monitors, but who knew?  I didn’t find any other way while consulting Google.  I was very close to just tucking them into my trash can and covering them with kitchen garbage to fool the trashman, so I felt quite responsible disposing of them properly.

Then I managed a quick trip to Target before I returned home at noon to work.

I worked until five–with a quick interruption to drive the neighbor girl to her volleyball practice and to pick up my own daughter from school.  The rain began as I ventured out at 3:30 p.m.  Great.  Because that is exactly what we need for Saturday morning’s soccer game.

A little after five, I drove my teens to meet their friend and his mom.  They are spending the night at their friend’s house.   So it’s quiet and no one will be eating a snack at 2:00 a.m.

I’m living a life crammed full with tedium.

In seven hours and twelve minutes, I need to be showered and dressed for rain and ready to leave the house for Grace’s soccer game.  She has team pictures first and we have to arrive by 8:20 a.m., which is a crime, if you ask me.

But no one asked me.

I spent three hours tonight in my storage room puzzling over the random belongings that have been taking up space.

My task seems simple enough:  pack up what we’re keeping and gather what we’re giving away and get rid of it.

I have done this over and over again and every time I go back into the room, I am faced with more stuff.  I promise I am not a hoarder but I cannot give up my piano books or the framed pictures or my box of thread.  For one thing, I’ve been meaning (for years) to paint those frames black and hang up those pictures again.  And what if I get my sewing machine fixed and begin to sew again one day?  What if?

The back of my van is once again full of stuff to drop off at Value Village, including a lovely sturdy metal filing cabinet and a particle board microwave stand.  I found a place that will take an old dead computer and gigantic broken monitor.  Tomorrow morning I must resist the lure of my cozy bed and drop off all that stuff.

I hope that Saturday will be the day I triumph over the storage room.

However, I may not survive Saturday morning.  We have to arrive at the soccer field at 8:20 a.m. for team pictures before the 9 a.m. game.

That is just unkind.

You never know when you might feel an odd pang of regret.

You can be minding your own business when you suddenly realize how self-conscious and self-centered you were as a college student.  You wonder why you didn’t ask better questions and get to know a wider array of people when you had the chance.  Instead, you just worried that your hair was too frizzy and that your stomach was too fat and that no one would ever actually want to marry you.

You look around and see how few friends you’ve accumulated while settled on this patch of land and you realize you must have done something wrong, terribly, terribly wrong.  Are you still so cocooned in your own little world that you have failed to reach out to other people?  Do you repel people?  Do you smell?  What, exactly, could be wrong with you?  Is it your breath?

You reach a particular age and you realize that some doors have closed behind you.  In fact, they have clanged with the finality of prison bars, locking you out.  And even though you wanted to be where you are, you’re kind of bummed that you can’t retrace your steps and choose a different sort of life.  Why didn’t you become a nurse when you had the chance?  What stopped you from going to a better college?

You’re too old, too old, too old says the chant in your head.

You wonder about your dad and wish you’d known him as a person instead of as an obstacle to elude and an authority to avoid.  You were always so scared in a vague sort of undefined way.  What frightened you?  If only you’d been braver and spoken up when you had the chance.  If only you’d known how to ask better questions and been brave enough to hear the answers.

You remember the diary you kept were you in second grade.  It was a five-year diary, which is an impossible block of time to comprehend when you are eight.  You can’ t believe you burned it when you were eighteen, afraid that someone would laugh at the scrawled thoughts of your eight-year old self.  You were embarrassed about being childlike, even when you were a child.  You still cringe at reminders of your childhood actions.

You’re still scared but without good reason.  You’re still that eight year old girl underneath it all.  You still worry that no one will sit with you in the cafeteria.

You wish you were outward facing instead of inward focused.

That would change your perspective and your life.

You know it’s true.