Okay, Now, Concentrate

This morning, Responsibility dug her cold, unforgiving fingers into my arms and yanked me out of bed when the rest of my body didn't want to and I had to hit the ground running because it's Thursday which is the busiest day of the week for me and involves thorough planning and packing before I even leave the house in the morning and I sat a little bit too long over my coffee because I was still fighting with Thursday about whether I would do it or not and that made my hour-long car time a little stressful because, as everybody knows, if you leave one minute late in the morning, you will catch traffic that causes you to be twenty minutes late to everything else in the world and by the time I got to work, I thought I wanted to sit at my desk and knit because I have a rather mindless job and I am usually so on top of things, but instead I found my desk piled high with meaningless tasks and paperwork that forced my body to frantically spend the day copying and sorting and mailing and publishing while my brain was quite free to wander and be stressed out about the to-do list it was holding for me, knowing full well that nothing could be done about it at work anyway, even though most of it is self-imposed (I find that I am able to put more pressure on myself than I would ever allow anyone else to do) and I found that I had to rush out the door and leave the Pile-That-Has-No-Bottom on my desk to wait until I come back tomorrow and I picked up both of the kids, managing to work a little bit of Honeybee Stole knitting in (that thing has totally been kicking my butt) while I sat in the car lines and I scooted into my mom's house to grab the guitar that's been sitting there (because I remembered to drop it off this morning) instead of in my trunk so it wouldn't overheat and then we headed for the music studio for Andrew's guitar lesson where I was anticipating his first baritone lesson as well (which means we actually have to remember two instruments) and I made Emma bring her homework in and I told Andrew that he could switch out instruments and grab his homework to do in the half-hour between guitar and baritone lessons and we headed in to the studio and found out that there wasn't a slot yet for baritone so we had to regroup, but I managed to knit a little bit on that stole while Andrew quizzed Emma for her tests tomorrow (I'm really glad I didn't have to do that) and when we left I caught the slightest bit of nice breeze out and realized that it was pleasant and not at all humid, even though it's awfully hot, and I really didn't want to do any of what I had left to do, but I had to so we headed to my mom's for a finish-the-homework pit stop and headed to Chick-fil-a for supper because I don't have time to cook between Drew's lessons and ballet, and my husband really cracked me up across the table at dinner, which was nice because I had to spend the rest of my evening feeling greasy and smelling like french fries, so at least that was something, and at dinner I found out that I missed the first Open House of the school year because I neglected to write it in my paper brain and his stupid school doesn't send any paper communication so I forgot all about it and now I look like a sucky mom and have no recourse by which to contact his teachers and find out how he's doing because I feel so out-of-touch and we dropped back by our house to change for ballet and I made a few phone calls and left Andrew at home to wait for Dad, who was following closely behind us in his work car, and we made it to ballet on time, which is great because I didn't think we would and they danced to the Pas de Deux from the Nutcracker, which is my favorite because it always-always-always breaks my heart in the very best of ways and I started back in on that Honeybee Stole, because I had nothing else to do, and found that I was actually kicking its butt this time and upon that discovery found myself thinking things like, "take that you silly bits of string!" and "who's in charge now, you big wuss?" and realized that I was totally taking my aggression out on this thing of absolute beauty (honestly - I can't wait to finish so you can all see it!) and felt a little bit bad, but not as bad as I felt about missing the Open House at Andrew's school (insert feelings of utter failure and doom), only to be redeemed when one of Chopin's Etudes started playing and I saw Emma doing her rond de jambes and I started feeling a little bit better and made a few more necessary phone calls on the way home and realized I was just having one of those days that feels like an enormously long run-on sentence.

DAILY BLISS: a wildly animated (because it had to be super-short, and how else are you going to pack a catching-up into three minutes) conversation with a friend-I-bumped-into in the Chick-fil-a parking lot