I’ve been tagged for a meme by Psych Patient MD and The Blog Queen

The rules of the “6 Random Things About Me Meme”:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself. (See below)
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (See further below…)
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Is there anything that I write about myself here that is NOT random? Hmmmm.

6 Random Things About Me

1. I talk to my plants.  And I think it’s perfectly normal.
2. If I had to fend for myself, I would eat A LOT of toast. And I’d like it.
3. Sometimes I curse like hell at other drivers.  Most times, I just ignore them and say pleasant things like, “Jesus and your mom love you.  I think you’re an asshole.”
4. I find doing my hair a supreme waste of time.
5. I don’t like sugary drinks.  This includes liquor, coffee, and juice.  I’ll take it without the sugar, please.
6. One of my pet peeves: not being able to find stuff.  I get irritated when things are moved from the last place I put them.

Now, I tag Landon, Jody, Kim, And that’s it. I don’t have to follow the rules.  It’s my blog.  Have fun!

I put together a page (look at the top right corner) called LOA treasures.  In it, I put a collection of some of my favorite posts, yunno, the ones I just had to keep for posterity!

Check her out!

Hooray for quiet!

It seems like it’s been a while… it’s really only been just under two weeks.  We had the kids for a little more than half a week.  Which is normally fine, but with all of my other responsibilities, I feel like just after seven days has passed, I’m at my rope’s end.

I’m blessed, though, truly blessed.  I’m blessed because I can talk with my guy and express my needs, and he can express his, and we can work on compromises.  That’s a beautiful, magnificent characteristic of my relationship with him. Yes, indeed, I love that man more than anything!

The sun’s shining outside on this chilly November morning.  I love Colorado for that reason– even if it were that reason alone, but it’s not alone… the sun shines more than three hundred days a year here.  It may be cold, it might even be freezing, but the sun shines.   And that’s yet another blessing.

I finished The Divine Comedy by Dante yesterday.  It was for school… for those of you who are not familiar, Dante wrote this Epic Poem (that’s French for a really damn long poem), and broke it into three books:  Inferno (Hell), Purgatory, and Paradise (Heaven).   I found the Hell part to be the most interesting, because there was more activity and drama… Heaven was fine, and so was Purgatory, but there just was very little action.  And heaven was filled with bright lights and effulgence and stuff, and that’s wonderful, but not as interesting.

The point of the poem was for Dante to describe his adventure of moving throughout these after life pit stops and essentially defining the behaviors, prominent people and their sins, and tell why they got to the certain destination, how long they’d be there, and what they’d be doing while they stayed.   That’s what I thought was interesting, though, as he went through all these different sins and virtues, I’d disturbingly think to myself, “Hey, I do that.  Damn.”  or “I have that virtue, hooray for that level in Heaven!!”  Except for that in my reality, I don’t particularly believe in an afterworld. And certainly not Heaven nor Hell.  But I was drawn into the story and fought to forget that I don’t believe those things… darn that Lutheran upbringing.

Anyway… I’m glad I finished that book and am on to the next.  In another class, I’m writing a research proposal– I’m going to do an experiment that determines if blogging is an effective means to decrease stress in college students.  I know, we all know the answer to that already, but we have to prove this scientifically.  Sounds fun, no?

*chuckle*

I think Landon’s sister, also known as my best friend, may be moving in with us.  It’ll be challenging, but I also think it’ll be good and rewarding.

What else…  Stay tuned.

I drank a cuppa Yerba Mate tea.  I meant for it to clear my mind so that I could stay awake with enough clarity to finish my journal response I had to write this evening for my Arts & Letters class.

Now I can’t sit still.  My honey’s upstairs chilling to the television, and I’m afraid that if I went up there, I’d be moving so much I’d wake him up.  Just in case he’s sleeping.

Yerba Mate Pros: yum, keeps ya clear, and feels good.

Yerba Mate Cons: caffeine
I’ve cut out a lot of caffeine lately.  Like almost all.  Of course, that’s not been helping with the tiredness, but it’s also not really changing whether or not I can fall asleep.  I mean it has, I can’t fall asleep with caffeine in my system, but I also sometimes have troubles falling asleep when I don’t have caffeine in there.

*sigh*

I’m going to bed now.   See ya all again in about twenty minutes.

I’m speechless, and THRILLED!

It’s still ME!  It’s me, Ash.  Still.  Yes, my page looks funny.  I changed my theme.  Do you like it???

The house is quiet. I’m totally thankful for that.
Today was a pretty terrible day for me.
Not terrible in that something bad happened, but terrible in that I felt terrible!
I woke up nauseous, then a few hours later threw up. I can’t remember the last time I threw up for reasons besides alcohol– and for some reason a drunken spew is far easier to handle than a wake-up-at-six-on-a-weekend-and-spew-for-no-reason. Ugh.
No, I’m not pregnant (of course I’m not!), and there’s no possibility that I am.
I had a fever all day, and was up for a total of two hours, feeling like death warmed over, but the rest of the day was consumed by a deep, deep, healing sleep.

I’m feeling better. Hooray for Advil, extra-strength liquid capsules. They are like heaven. I’m also terribly thankful that I lead an essentially toxin-free lifestyle so that these Liquidgels (or whatever the hell they’re called) actually work, and quickly.

I’m still not sure I could hold something down if I ate it, though I’m willing to give either cheesecake or ice cream an opportunity to prove me wrong. I haven’t eaten anything today. Nothing sounds even relatively tasty.

My symptoms sortof sound flu-like. Except that I had my flu shot two weeks ago, and I’m not coughing nor do I have a sore throat. I doubt it is food poisoning, either, though one can never be certain.

Anyway, I know this is all far too much information. However, there are a few things that are absolutely wonderful: First of all, my guy is the most wonderful man on the planet, and second of all, life IS very good, and sometimes it’s a great idea to sleep all day long.

The only child
Doesn’t always mean more attention from grown-ups.
Sometimes it means
Waking up mom when you need a diaper change
And putting blankies in fish tanks
And records, too
And my bottle.
Twice.
Sometimes it means you create a vivid imagination:
An imaginary friend named Jesus,
And angels.
Sometimes it means whispering goodnight to the lion
Who protects you at night,
Even if he’s only a pillowcase.
The only child,
With friends,
But hard friends,
Because it’s hard to share
The little things,
Like Secrets
And Barbies,
And my aunt Becky calls me Sell-Fish.
But she doesn’t know
What it’s like to be alone.
She doesn’t know
What it’s like to have to fight for what’s yours.
Because being an only child
Doesn’t always mean more attention from grown-ups.

It sounds so remedial, but it’s still amazing to me that how you feel is affected by so many variables.  Maybe I’m just getting “old” in my ripe young age and therefore more sensitive to the things that make me feel bad.

Sleep is a great example.  I have always said that I need, generally speaking, eight hours of sleep.  This semester, I’ve been getting somewhere between six and seven hours.   In the last two days, I’ve been getting about four hours of really shitty sleep.

It’s no wonder to anyone that today I felt baaaaad.  Like sad, angry, irritated, lonely, needy kind of bad.   Ladies, you know what I’m talking about.  I know you do, I am one.

I’ve begun to discover that there are certain triggers that push me into feeling bad like that– alcohol is a big one.  Not eating right?  Check, another.  And not sleeping enough.  Well, hell.

I know I’m doing a lot and conquering the world and what not.  I know My Eyes Were Bigger Than My Stomach when I filled my plate… but I love my life.  I’m doing exactly what I said I would do.  I’m just, I dunno, exhausted while I’m doing it all.  Which makes for a less overall happy Ash sort of functionality.  And anything less than happy is, well, it’s not happy.

I’m taking inventory of everything in my daily life that is preventing me from sleeping.

Work is the biggest one.  I spend two hours every day commuting to and from work.   Then, I spend between seven and nine hours at work, depending on if I have class afterwards.  If I have class, I spend another fifty minutes in the car getting to class, and then a little more than three hours at class, half an hour commuting back home… but it doesn’t end there.  I spend an hour and a half taking care of the kids in the morning (making breakfast and lunch, getting them up, getting them dressed, getting them ready for school).  Then I spend another two to three hours of helping them with homework and getting them showered and ready for bed.   That leaves half an hour of not busting my ass to eat dinner– which my amazing wonderful honey makes for me– gourmet, nine times out of ten (thank you, love), one hour total to hang out with my guy (broken into ten six minute intervals), and five minutes to use the toilet in privacy, once a week.  (wink)

*sigh*   It’s a lot, and none of it is negotiable.  Work, school, and the kids is part of what I desire, it’s what I’m doing, it’s what I want, and all three are taking their fair share of my attention.  If I could really work it to the best of what would work for me, I would work from home, and have more time with my honey.  And by more time with my honey, I mean, a few more hours a day.  Yesh… that would work beautifully.

Here’s the problem with the job and working from home:  it’s not going to happen.  My managers won’t allow it.  Even though I could just as easily do it here as I could at work.   It’s just not going to happen as far as they’re concerned.

And I don’t want to find another job, that’s nearly a certainty.  A) I love what I do, and I’m really, really good at it.  B) I love the department that I work in, and get along perfectly with the other staff.  C) I make excellent money, more than I’ve ever made.  D) I work for doctors who are professors at the medical school I’m going to attend, and they encourage me to go where I am going.  E) Medical school that I will be attending is on the same campus as work, so I have to be used to the drive by the time I get to medical school.

We’re not moving any time soon, either.  My mom owns this house, is flexible with rent due dates, it’s relatively inexpensive to live here, we’re already putting money into the house to fix it up the way we want, and we have the awesomest most wonderful neighbors in the universe.  And that ain’t no lie.

So.

As exhausted as I am with everything I do, I really, truly LOVE what my life is.  I just don’t know how much more of this burning both ends of the candle thing I can do any more.

And, oh, look, here’s a pattern: I wrote Exhaustion Junkie in April.

Yep.  I’m crazy.

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