It’s not surprising that my energy waxes and wanes. Part of it is the intensity with which I live life. Generally, I’m all thrills and spills. (I actually disclosed this to my calm, even-keeled and measured husband. I knew emotionally he was getting the short end of the stick and felt an obligation to make sure he knew.) The other common reason that my mojo waxes and wanes is related to how we live. We usually have some sort of home improvement project going on, we are in some stage of either garden or yard care (including snow removal in winter) and my job has its own periods of intensity. But lately, my mojo was on the wane. I just didn’t have a ton of energy and I was, candidly, getting pretty frustrated about it.
I hate it when I don’t have energy. I tend to get very scattered and have a tough time focusing. That causes me to lose sight of a deadline or a detail that ends up causing me to go into “scramble mode”. I also find it hard to self-motivate during those times, which means each day starts to feel like its own mini-tortuous experience.
Today, I feel like it may be bouncing back just a little bit. I’ve got a clear-eyed plan for the day, which certainly helps. It also helps that I slept better than I have been. But, I’ve also got a four-day weekend coming up and straight up, nothing motivates a girl like a four-day weekend. Once again, I’m struck by just how much Friday’s off have meant for my life.
But here’s the deal: even a four-day weekend doesn’t mean that there will be a totally “free” day in there. That’s part of how we live our life. Over those four days, I need to paint our new laundry room/butler’s pantry area, take care of about 20 pounds worth of tomatoes, introduce two cats to each other as we try to blend our little family once more and generally clean and keep our lives running somewhat smoothly.
However, the fact that we’re now at the point where I can paint means that our current renovation project is getting closer to the finishing stages. Same with the cats. If we’re now able to introduce Meadow and Twister (we’ll find out today from the vet), we’re now at the end stage of his adoption. That means we’ve gone through the whole making friends/capture part, the getting-him-healthy part, the can-he-be-a-house-cat part and the will-he-bond-with-humans part. Yes, the next two weeks will be intense to ensure that the two cats make friends and we can all live happily together, but it’s the last phase. And finally, the garden is just about to wind down and enter a pretty dormant phase until next February when we need to start ordering seeds and making plant starts.
So it feels – finally – we may get to a quiet couple of weekends in the near future. And once again, it feels like this is happening just as fall arrives. On one hand, that makes sense. Living in the north, you’ve got to do your projects when the weather will actually cooperate, although the laundry/pantry/bathroom was an indoor project. Additionally, when my husband was teaching, summers were the time to do projects as he was off. The garden is self-explanatory. And the cats? Well, that actually is a bit weather dependent, too. We tried to make friends with Twister over the winter but we weren’t outside that much and it did really rely on an outdoor venue to start getting along.
But, as we enter these home stretches on what ended up being a little bit busier stretch than we intended, my mojo is coming back. It’s strange, but it always wanes right after we hit the halfway mark of projects. It just feels like we’ve been doing whatever “it” is for a long time and still have a long way left to go. Then, we turn some sort of metaphorical corner and I see the finish line. We may be only at 75% or so, but it now feels doable. That’s when my energy picks back up.
So, heading into this long weekend, I hope that by the end of it, we can start to check items off of our list. Cat introduction started. Painting done in the laundry/pantry. Cabinets ready to be installed. Pocket door mechanism completed. Tomatoes processed. Onions harvested. Who knows what else? Maybe I can sneak a few hours in to read a book or go for a long walk. It doesn’t matter. The end is now in sight.
The Yuppie Homesteader 