Thursday, April 12, 2012

Tired + Tense

Credit: zazzle.com

The pork roast is cooking in the oven. The kids are in the house and ignoring the beautiful outside. Lynda is still at work. And I'm taking a few minutes to vent some long-form frustrations here on the ole blog.

This week hasn't been the best one that I've ever had for a couple of reasons. First, I'm back to working at night to try and keep to a work deadline. I've got lots of tedious, repetitive things to do and a short amount of time to do it in. So, to keep up the pace, I'm working during the day, taking a slight evening break for dinner and family, then trying to stay focused and energetic enough to squeeze in a few more hours of effort before I give up out of sheer spite. And this is only the first week that I'm back to this sort of grind, with (most likely) a good handful of weeks to go. So, I've got to find ways to keep up a good attitude about it all until this task is done and I can shift my attention to the next project on deck.

Outside of work, things at home are sort of tense as well. One of the kids has not been performing well enough at school--mostly due to organizational deficiencies and lack of follow through. This has resulted in repeating patterns of assignments being turned in late, lost equipment, and (when discovered and confronted) an inability to demonstrate enough acknowledgement that a problem exists that needs to be taken seriously. As a result, Lynda and I decided to punish her by preventing attendance at an upcoming birthday party. This has resulted in some disengaged attitudes at home and a certain level of distance that wasn't there before. And I guess that is just the way it is going to be until things improve and feelings heal. I'm not in love with being a bad guy, but that is the role of the parent. So, I'm going to heel it up to get the point across.

But I'm not really liking it.

And in my tired, tense state, everything has the potential to become more of a problem that maybe it should be. Like right now, I would really love for the girls to get outside and feel some sun on their skin. But I'm not forcing them to drop everything and go outside. And what would they do? Hannah can't be unsupervised, so they'd have to stay in the backyard. So they can't really engage with other kids. (And so I feel badly about that . . . even though I know they've been with their friends at school all day long.) And I can't go out there with them because I'm trying to get dinner ready. (After I finish writing this, of course.) Because I have some notion that I need to have dinner ready when Lynda get home. (See ladies . . . it CAN cut both ways!) So we can eat, and maybe get outside AFTER dinner before the sun goes down. But I've got work to do. And I'm tired.

Nothing is making me happy and everything is a problem.

Thanks for reading!

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