Melancholy

I've been feeling somewhat melancholy. Maybe melancholy isn't the right word, but I just haven't felt like myself in a while.

My job has been stressful and hectic. Also, there are lots of changes happening there. My role has changed again, and we are transitioning to a new platform which I am trying to learn. I used to know all the answers and felt very confident about the old platform. Now I feel like its my 1st week at a new job. I find it hard to be motivated or creative. I'm more reactive at work now. I even wake up earlier than I need to and have trouble getting back to sleep because I begin to think about what I have to do at work. But its not just about work.

For weeks there was the waiting for the condo deal to happen. We settled 2 weeks ago and since then I have been going back and forth with 2 different contractors trying to get a reasonable price for the remodeling. I hate negotiating, but I can't afford to pay too much so I have to do it, which adds more stress to my life.

Then there's the porch expansion. We'd been trying to get our builder to give us a price and commit to a start date since last fall. Then in early June - just as the condo deal solidified - he gives us the price and says he's ready to start. We really didn't want to have to pay for the condo, the remodeling, and the porch expansion all at the same time. That's stressful too. But our only recourse was to postpone the porch, which would mean its completion would be at the end of the summer, when we'd have little use of it until the next year. So the porch expansion is going on too.

Then there's the yard. Before the condo and porch deals happened, I had worked with a landscape company to fix up our yard. The garage construction wrecked our grass, which wasn't that great to begin with. I got an estimate to regrade the yard, put better soil in the beds, move some plants, add some plants, put down some sod and some river rocks. But the yard project got put on hold when the condo deal happened and the porch project happened. Spouse simply won't spend any money on the yard right now, so the weeds are getting out of control. We've had no rain so the grass that was left is dead, yet somehow the weeds manage to survive. I hate seeing the yard this way, but I agree with him that we shouldn't spend anymore money right now. Although I know its the right thing to do, it still bothers me to see the brown, dead patches and weeds.

Then there's the blogs. I used to do a pretty good job of keeping up with the blogs to which I subscribe. But over the last few months I have just not been able keep up with them. Reading blogs during the day is just out of the question now. I feel like I'm busy all the time, so in the evening after dinner I often prefer to relax and veg in front of the TV. So, I feel like I've lost touch with many of the smart, funny, entertaining people I used to feel like I knew. I've also noticed a drop in comments here, which could be because I've not been reading/commenting on other's blogs, or it could be because my posts aren't as interesting as they used to be. I don't know.

And then there's the invasion. Tomorrow Spouse's mother, sister, brother-in-law, and their 3 teenagers are arriving for a visit. For a week. Several unplanned large expenses have caused them to feel they couldn't rent a beach house in Myrtle Beach this summer like they usually do, so they asked if they could spend a week's vacation here. Now, I love these folks and genuinely appreciate the way they have whole-heartedly accepted me into the family, especially in light of my biological family's behavior. But you know the old saying: Fish and house guests both get old and smelly after 3 days. I can't believe we're going to have 6 extra people here for an entire week. I'm sure they won't be here in the house all day while I'm trying to work. Spouse is taking off the entire time they'll be here so I'm sure he'll go with them to the beach, the waterpark, etc during the day, so my ability to concentrate at work will likely not be affected that much, if at all. But its all the rest of the time! I won't be able to watch TV at night in a loose pair of boxers, or fart out loud for a week! I don't know how I'm going to make it.

So that's what's going on with me, in case you're interested.

Crush du Jour: Eliad Cohen