Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Curves.
Ack! My mind is bouncing around all over the place tonight. I’m in hyperdrive. And that means I’ll fall asleep exhausted after doing everything tonight and still feeling I’ve accomplished nothing.
I’ve done really well in the last month or so toward focusing all that excess energy into productive intellectual pursuits, but every now and then, the energy manifests itself more physically than mentally and I just can’t stop and focus on one thing. Fortunately, it doesn’t last for days at a time, but it still annoys me.
It really wasn’t bad when I had a house-full of family but when it’s just me, by myself and the kids are with their dad, my focus shifts. Almost as if my energy alone has to expand physically to fill the house…the whole house.
This is most likely because I collapsed into a nap the minute I got home from work today and now have all this extra get-up-and-go and tonight I’m taking the night off from working at Spilled Candy or doing any book writing. Unfortunately, I can’t sit still and I’m not feeling very grounded.
Why does this annoy me? Just look at the past hour….
The girls just left and there’s no power-walk tonight to help me ground so I’ll just go take a hot bath and con- template the cute guy I talked to at work today, but you know, I’m pretty sure he’s married so what’s the use in even thinking about that when I need to figure out a marketing idea, so I walk into the bathroom and start to turn on the bath and realize that the girls haven’t watered the plants this week and those 3 little ones are dead and I need to just go ahead and throw them out, so I walk back to the kitchen and get a trash bag to take to the bathroom but oh, wait, there’s a new email from a writer friend about our marketing idea but okay, I’ll answer back later because right now I really need to empty that trash can beside my desk and who’s been eating cashews because we don’t have those in the house so they must have come from my ex’s via the girls and at least they’re not like the bazillion sunflower seeds that got spilled all over the kitchen two weeks ago and I had to clean them up while Aislinn held the dog out of the way but let me go back to the kitchen for that trash bag I left there and oh, while the dog is with the girls, I think I’ll go ahead and do some laundry, especially the dry cleaning but oh, wait, I forgot that I’m out of the home dry cleaning kits and I’ll just run up to the drug store that often has them on special and hey, there’s an empty bottle of laundry detergent on the washing machine so I better go ahead and toss it in the recycling bin but whoops, someone left a bag of trash on the garage steps after our massive clean-up this week so I’ll take that out to the curb right now while I’m thinking about it and now that I’m back in the house and loading some dirty towels into the washing machine, I need more laundry detergent, which I keep on a self in the garage because I bought tons of it when CVS had the $6.50 bottles on sale for $2.00 each and I cleaned them out and now the bottles are all gone but the last 2 and so I pick one up in the garage and notice the empty bottle from earlier still by the steps where I didn’t take it to the recycling bin earlier so I do that now and go back inside and start a load of towels and then go back to the office to get another full trash bag and stop to look around the office at how much Shannon got cleaned up and put away from the to-do list I’d given her and maybe I’ll just go ahead and hop on the treadmill now and take a bath later and watch my Net-Flix TV series on DVD and oh, yeah, I got a new DVD in today and what this one was, I don’t know, so I go check it out and it’s ho-hum and I leave it on the table and go back to garage to turn off the light and lower the garage door and then back to the office for those full trash bags which I take out to the trash can at the curb and go back into the house to find my purse and keys and put on a bra so I don’t offend anyone at the drugstore and then I get into the car and head to CVS but they’ve just closed, so I head to the grocery store and pass the ATM and I need to make that deposit but I think I’ll do that at daylight and oh, I do need to make an appointment to get my hair cut at the place across the street and stop by Ace Hardware next door for some sprinkler repair material but everything’s closed except the grocery store so I find a place to park and head inside, realizing that I’m wearing pajama bottoms but it’s okay because they’re very conservative and look like shorts and besides, most of the men here tonight are holding hands and wouldn’t look my way even if I hadn’t gone back for a bra before leaving home so I grab a cart and aim it at the laundry aisle but the flowers are really pretty tonight and I feel like purple mums at the moment so I toss them into my cart and pass some interesting-looking wheat-free waffles that I bet would taste good with the raspberries in my fridge and I finally make it to the laundry aisle and find what I need, along with some fresh-baked bread and dipping oils and some gourmet deli-type sweet potatoes and homemade stuffing in a display but you know, I haven’t stopped by a blood pressure machine in this grocery store for a while so I plop down and put my arm in the cuff and it’s higher than usual tonight by far—125 over 74—so I pay at the cash register and rush my groceries out to the car and then toward home and I should probably stop for gas but no, I have cold stuff in the grocery bags and I really want to get home and take a long soak bath but when I get home, I have to put away groceries but first I check email to see if I got an answer back that I’ve been waiting on about that marketing idea but no, the only email is spam from adultfriendfinder which is ridiculous with all its photos of male body parts and so amusingly typical of the male mindset in thinking that that’s what women want to see when it’s what men want to see and sheesh, it’s good for a laugh and then I go back to the kitchen and put away the frozen goods in the freezer near the office and there’s that treadmill and maybe I should go hop on it now and do the bath later but oh, yeah, I have more cold stuff to go in the fridge so I go back to the kitchen and put away the last of the groceries and put my mums in water and think that it sounds dirty when I think of it that way and then I get the dry cleaning started in the laundry room and decide to hop on the treadmill with the last half of Spanglish which I didn’t finish the other night because I had to go back to work but hey, I’m not sure I turned off the water for the bath so I run back to my bathroom and sigh because I never turned it on, which is a damned fine thing that I didn’t, and that’s when I notice the dress hanging from the doorknob and remind myself that I need to go ahead and sell it on eBay to put toward the Healing Center and oh, I left the dead plants in here that I need to take the kitchen and I don’t remember where I put the trash bags so I go back to the kitchen and get myself a glass of milk and try to remember what I came back for and decide I’ll just go ahead and go to bed.
Yes, that’s my past hour. And now, I will attempt to walk the length of the house to where my bedroom is, turn out the lights, and crawl into bed without anything shiny pulling me in a different direction.
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