weekend blues

I have simply got to start planning better for road trips. Even the short ones – like the jaunt down the mountain to RB’s house on Friday night – are entirely too stressful for me. I’m inevitably late packing. There’s always one more load of laundry to do, one more thing to get, one more place to go, one more item on the list that I don’t remember until we’re halfway there, in which case I’m upset because I forgot it (or thought I did, anyway.) Short trips, long trips; it hardly matters anymore.

Once we arrived, some peace descended. Duckie played hard with RB’s older boy. There’s enough space that she could run herself in circles all night long – and did, for a long time. I think they may have set a record for the most hours of tag in one night.

I had made a chocolate cream pie with raspberry sauce for RB’s birthday. (In case you’re wondering, homemade everything. Drool at will.) I brought the makings of a sinful Greek salad; you know, the kind that hardly qualifies as a salad because of the olives and feta cheese and… oh goodness, yes, that’s the kind of salad I can get into.

Good food, fantastic conversation (ranging from leg shaving to the Vagina Monologues to burkhas to women’s lib), a glass or two of smooth and inexpensive shiraz, my daughter watching too much television and *gasp* playing video games. But, for the most part, she ran rampant through the house, laughing maniacally. God, I just love that sound.

Duck and I spent the night cuddled in the cozy sleigh bed in the upstairs bonus room. I woke up feeling pretty shitty. Not physically – although that was part of it (see below) – just really blah. I woke up feeling envious of RB’s house. Envy isn’t usually a problem for me, but it sank its teeth in hard that morning. I could have spent hours cleaning her marble countertops, shining her brand-spanking-new stainless steel sink, checking for hot spots in her new oven.

We headed back in time to get dinner started in the crock pot and take a long nap. Despite the Jabba-sized pile of laundry to fold on our couch, I just couldn’t rouse myself to give a shit. I couldn’t even get up the gumption to do dishes, a prerequisite for cole slaw, because you have to soak the cabbage leaves in the sink before you chop them up. So the barbeque was lacking in cole slaw – another failure. (If you’ve ever experienced depression or even just had a really shitty day, you’ll know that this tends to snowball.)

Last week my left eyelid started swelling up for no good reason that I could tell. I’m thinking it was some kind of allergic reaction. It’s happened before and eventually went away. But Saturday and Sunday it got truly grotesque, to the point where I didn’t even want to go out lest people think I’d been beaten up. (This is more likely than you might think, given our location.)

I’d been struggling with an awful facial breakout for the entire week. It wasn’t getting much better. In between the pimples and my unfortunate resemblance to Quasimodo, I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror.

I could have gone to the yoga class on Saturday, but I didn’t. I suppose I could have done yoga sometime over the weekend, but I didn’t. I suppose I could have managed a shower sometime on Saturday, but I didn’t.

Damned if I could tell what triggered it. I seem to be pulling out of it a wee bit at a time. I’m hoping it’s PMS. Hard to tell these days.

There’s a road trip to the beach coming up in a couple of weeks. RB has agreed to keep Duckie for the weekend so Brian and I can have a bit of adult time together. Mostly this will consist of trying to keep warm in one way or another. Our friend W’s family has a beach house on the intra-coastal waterway, which is really great in season (we had our wedding party there), and lovely off-season too, because it’s deserted. There’s a huge wood stove in the house, and I intend to spend a fair amount of time as close as possible to it without singeing my hair. A trip to the library is in order, I believe.

I’ll start planning now. I’ll start packing this weekend. Surely I can manage this a little better. I’m a grown woman. I’m intelligent, capable, and experienced in organization and stress management techniques.

I can do this.

I’ll start tomorrow.

*********

P.S. It did not help that the temporarily reunited Police picked Roxanne as their Grammy opener. So many fantastic songs to choose from – Spirits in the Material World would have been just perfect, but of course Roxanne won out, being their first hit single. It’s not that I don’t care about that song – I actively dislike it. And I was so looking forward to the performance, too. Still, I'll check for tickets.

P.P.S. It does not help that my boss is still stressed out and spreading it around the lab like so much gloomy fertilizer. I often enjoy her company, but due to my constant fear of her temper, I have taken to ignoring her completely unless she talks to me first. Plus I look more like I’m working. (Which, actually, I am, believe it or not.)

P.P.P.S. Miss MH (who gave me the recipe for the cream cheese frosting) reported that she’d seen Sheri (of the unwashed children) at a local grocery store yelling at her kids for no good reason that MH could see. Kids were grimy, cart was full of sugary sodas and “nothing I saw that was good for kids. No hygiene products, no cereal, nothing. I heard her screaming at Bubba two aisles over. ‘Bubba, you get back here right now! Don’t make me hunt you!’”

I drop my head in shame. Because I’m listening to gossip. And because I know I have spoken sharply to my daughter in public as well. I am not one to judge another woman on that. RB and I have agreed that we both feel bad for Sheri – her mother left early in her life, so it’s pretty clear that she has no model to go by. She never had a mother to show her the kind of love she could give to her kids.

But also I drop my head in shame that I don’t know how to help these kids. DSS is already involved to a certain extent. If anyone’s got ideas, let me know. I worry about them. A lot.