Slothfulness Here I Come

I've been pretty quiet on here for the past few weeks, as you've probably (hopefully) noticed. It has not been just the product of my insane amount of multi-tasking, but also the result of my DH's work trips to Memphis for the past two weeks. He gets home today and I am pooped! I don't know how families with a parent who travels a lot actually accomplish anything. I have fed myself and the children fast food or convenience food for about one meal per day. I quickly exhausted leftovers in the freezer and at dinnertime I am especially vulnerable to convenience. I have had enough take-out pizza and fast food chicken nuggets to last me for a while, I think.

It is perhaps a good thing that I was not allowed to be so slothful as to never tidy up the house while DH has been gone. He has been home for the weekends and pitched in to get the kids to tidy up their toys and such, but in addition I have had babysitters in the house on my teaching days, and I have had friends over for playdates to keep a bit of fresh perspective and sanity. Nothing like having a Navy wife over, whose husband is currently on a multi-month deployment, to make me stop carping about my terrible luck having a husband who has to be gone for nearly two whole weeks!

However, it is a lot of work being "on" all the time for children. Evenings are the most dreadful, because I am tired after dealing with them all day, and there is still a lot of work involved in getting dinner on the table, getting into PJs, getting teeth brushed and getting both of them put to bed, solo. I have been very cranky, and it shows. That is the time of day when they are most likely to be missing Daddy and cry for him (and having a cranky Mommy putting them to bed doesn't help, I imagine).

So, that has me feeling pretty beat. And I had to deal with some other issues, too, in DH's absence. The night before he left, we had a clog in our sewer line that backed up sewage into our shower stall, new bathtub, and hole for the kids' bathroom toilet that is currently plugged up with a towel. Yeah. Suffice it to say, cleaning up sewage from our bathroom shower, new tub, and not completely laid tile floor in the other bathroom, SUCKED. Did I mention that this was at about 9:30 pm? And DH was leaving the next day? DH got to stand out in the dark and cold with the rooter guy while he dug up our septic and snaked back from there. That's how we found out that our septic needed to be pumped. Oh joy. So I had to schedule that (for the day I was teaching, don't you know) and also had to play phone tag with three friends trying to get a babysitter, due to people having jury duty (maybe), a husband's heart stress test (cancelled, as it turned out) and a mother-in-law arriving on Friday. Yipper, I like knowing I HAVE to go to work without having someone definitively in place to watch my kids until the morning of. Totally non-stressful!

On top of that, I have been plagued with technological devils too. My laptop hard drive died, just went tttthhhhpppppttt!! at me and refused to be seen when I booted up the computer. A pain in the ass, to be sure, but ordinarily not a super huge deal. Except we are only 3 weeks into this quarter, I was out of the habit of emailing my grade file to myself (not teaching for the whole summer will do that to you), and I hadn't emailed my grades to myself. Guess what that means? Sending it off to a data recovery service, with an expected pricepoint of $500 and counting to get that file I have to have. Oh, joy. I hope they can get that file for me, or I am going to be facing some unpleasant alternatives. Thank you, I needed that new pilfering of our already depleted emergency fund. *sigh* And, my online moms' group which I have been participating in since 2004, has to move websites and that has resulted in confusion and basically a total non-participation by everyone, because no one knows which of the new sites we are actually committing to using, and since no one is posting on the original site, we haven't even had a proper discussion about it. I suspect this is in large part due to the fact that once we tried to move to their new partner site, the original site came up with a message that took up the whole screen and appeared (at least to me) as if they had already taken down our old site. Ugh. It's just a PITA, and I have been too busy to keep up with any discussions that are taking place across three different websites. Sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth!!

And my husband is in the final two weeks of his thesis writing for his master's degree. This would be the master's degree he started years ago, and only has to complete the thesis in order to receive it. The degree that his company has paid for. And now he is up against the clock because the school changed their requirements and this is the absolute last chance to squeak through with his old class requirements. And he's hemming and hawing to me about what he's actually, you know, WRITTEN, which makes me worry hugely about whether he is going to finish it in time. November 19th, and he is either done or he fails. Yeah. I am not happy about him waiting this long to do it. Seriously, he started this master's way before children. He even participated in the graduation ceremony, that his parents flew over from Ireland specifically to attend...even though he wasn't technically finished. Am I a bit steamed about him not doing it before? You think? Yepper. Believe me, he knows this. He also knows I have little sympathy for him, since he was a serious pain in my ass when I was writing my dissertation, so many, many moons ago. I got it done by getting up at 4 AM and writing until I burned out, for many weeks. So I am not a sympathetic ear, and hearing him prevaricate about whether he's going to actually finish, well, it pisses me off not a little. And that means that even though it's not my employer, it's not my degree, and it's not my thesis, I am sweating it out right along with him.

So I am very much looking forward to imitating a three toed sloth and not bestirring myself for anything over the next few days. I need a break, badly, from all of this crap. I need to go to Barnes & Noble, plop my butt down on a comfy chair, and read a book from start to finish without worrying once about my children, house, hard drive, unfinished bathroom, budget, my husband's job, thesis, or what have you. Whether or not this is actually going to be possible remains to be seen (thesis deadline? Yeah). I might just have to get a babysitter, boot my DH out of the house with his papers & laptop to go hibernate at Starbucks and WRITE THAT THESIS MISTER NO MORE EXCUSES! while I hie myself to Barnes & Noble and the quiet of a nice book. Now if I can just work the budget out sans my Quicken files to find the money to pay her...