I shouldn’t beat myself up, but I am – both physically and mentally it would seem. Yesterday on my way to therapy I tripped on the curb and dropped to my knees on the cement. I didn’t think too much of it at the time even though three people rushed to me and asked if I was okay. I brushed it off with the typical joke, “First day with my new feet.” They gave me really odd looks and I didn’t understand why. I swear it didn’t hurt at the time. Boy let me tell you, it hurts like hell now and both knees are badly bruised now. My fall must have looked really bad to them yesterday. If only it had stopped there.

This morning I took Scholar Owl with me to WalMart to pick up two small computer desks and hopefully a new dresser. My desk is falling apart and doesn’t look like it will survive another move. I’ve had this desk since 2004 or longer I think. It’s that old. Two of the drawers have crumbled apart now and the one remaining is about to. The hutch no longer shuts. If we move it again, chances are it will die completely. So I picked out a much smaller, moving friendlier one, along with another one suited for Little Bear since my dad plans on allowing him to use one of his spare computers.

Sadly thanks to my lack of foresight, it was only me and Scholar Owl to do the lifting. I pulled something in my back around the shoulder blades and did something to my hip. The area around my shoulder blades hurts a little and now my right arm feels weird too. My hip doesn’t hurt, but my right foot is numb so I know it pinched something. We got both in the cart with some help from an associate but forgot to ask for help getting them in the car. Now both desks are still my car and I’m not sure how we’re going to get them upstairs in the room where I need them to be. I don’t know when my brother is next able to swing by.

The second episode of my book was 2547 words long but I didn’t finish it until 5am this morning. I just kept writing until I felt like I had a good place to stop. Don’t have a good way to explain this other than it’s how I write my short stories. I would write until something inside me would say the story was done. I realize I’m writing a novel this time so it’s completely different but if people are reading it as I’m writing it a part of me doesn’t want to stop writing just because I hit some hard and fast word count. I want to stop in a place that kind of makes sense. It’s part of the reason I decided to call my entries episodes. It gives the promise of more to come for one and reminds me of what I’m trying to do.

Any how, I was hoping to have it done yesterday so that in a way I would be “caught up” in my word count goal, but that didn’t happen. At the moment I’m not even meeting the average word count per day but given all that I’m dealing with right now I’m trying to cut myself some slack. I’m still writing SOMETHING despite all the bullshit going on in my life. And I’m still getting the boys out on the school bus in clean clothes on time. They’re still being fed and looked after. I’ve been spending a lot of time with them. Even got quite a bit moved out of the apartment already. The only thing I could say I’m not doing right is shirking on my sleep. Got to fix that before I trigger a full on episode despite my meds.

What I don’t get is why is it I can usually write 1000 words or more for this blog with next to no effort but with my book I’m struggling? Is it the pressure of NaNoWriMo, or switching from short story format to novel format, or having an outline to go by, or a little of all three? I’m not saying it’s super hard, but it is a little challenging to stay focused and on task with it which is something I didn’t expect. The fight scene in this last episode was of particular note with this issue. I feel like I glazed over it and a part of me kept wanting to just hurry up and just move on to the “next thing” but I have no idea what my gut/brain was trying to say what that “next thing” is supposed to be other than what I have planned in the outline and if I had skipped the fight everything else after might not make much sense. So something is shifting and already the characters have demanded changes. I feel like I’m missing something important still and maybe that’s the problem. And I can no longer think in multiple threads like I used to thanks to this med. I feel like an outdated computer in need of a serious upgrade.

Don’t worry, I’m staying on the med. I can’t afford to go back to daily migraines. Not now especially. It’s bad enough that they have increased in frequency like they have. At least with the med I can function most days. Off the med I know for a fact most days I might as well be dead. And that’s just with the pain, never mind the mood cycles and nightmares. I can’t go back to all that.

A part of me is really tired this late morning and Scholar Owl strongly suggested that I take the day off to rest. The boy is wise and smart, let me tell you he makes me proud. But honestly my brain is telling me to push forward anyway. There is this niggling little voice telling me if I rest then I won’t get back up tomorrow or the next day and nothing will get done.

It doesn’t help that as I’m trying to write my post here today that my parents are asking me what my game plan is – for the second time today. My father really shouldn’t even be lifting and here is talking like he is planning on moving my couch over today and putting it in the room upstairs. Who will be doing that lifting? I thought my youngest brother wasn’t going to be available for that until next week. And quite frankly I really don’t have the desire to have my father in my apartment right now. He completely lacks discretion, talks too loud, and runs his damn mouth. The last time Scholar Owl and I were over there, the downstairs neighbor cracked her door open in the stairwell just enough to say it was open but not see it. You can’t tell me it wasn’t so she could try to hear anything we might say. So I reminded Dad that my brother said he would be available to help with moving furniture next week and that I plan to check out the rental storage units because he asked a THIRD TIME about my plans today and what I had to have over here.

Maybe I am too stubborn? Maybe I should have just let him go in and move my wooden frame futon couch thing but when I let him do that when we moved in, it was brand new and in the process he scratched the hell out of it in one place. I had just bought it. It’s things like that cut me to the core. I’m expected to treat everyone’s things like gold but my stuff gets treated like public property and with little respect at best. But mostly, honestly I would like to have a chance to get more cleaning done in there. I truly have no desire to get ripped out today by a man that feels it’s everyone else’s but his to clean.

When we were little he was never home so he has no idea what this shit is like. He didn’t have to really do the parenting thing beyond the early morning shit and after dinner bedtime run. Of course he got the holidays too but even then Mom did all the cleaning. It wasn’t until he retired that suddenly we got dumped with a lot of chores and a huge chunk of it involved farm work. Part of it was because Mom started working too. The other part of it was because Dad wasn’t at work all the time. So here I was at 14 finding my life completely changed in a serious way and Dad acting like this was the way it had always been. Nope. So there was just a lot of fighting on all sides. And it never really got better.

Even now my parents are finding ways to dump more and more on my boys. Yes they do need to know how to take care of themselves for when they become adults. But these chores should be shared between everyone living here, not dumped all on a select few. Scholar Owl dutifully takes out the trash now every day and hauls it out to the end of the driveway once a week without complaint. If we weren’t here they would have to do this themselves, but since we are here they expect him to do this and no one else. There is no reason why they can’t take the trash out themselves once in awhile. There is no reason why they can’t help him haul it out to the road on trash day. Why are they suddenly asking him to go out and cross the road to check the mail now? Have they forgotten that cars fly down the hill they live on? Every year my father plants a ridiculous amount of veggies and every year he bitches about how my mother doesn’t want to can them. He did the math and it costs the same if not more to can them as it does to just buy the canned veggies. So why the hell do all this? He claims it because of the salt. You can buy sodium free canned veggies now. It’s nothing but a headache. They are getting to old to do it and none of us are willing to do the work for jars of food we don’t usually get to keep because the harvest sucked that year.

Blah, Dad isn’t dropping it. No rest for the wicked. No mercy for the weary. I won’t be getting any rest today. I’ll be lucky if I get to work on my book. At least I’ve finally decided to use the nickname, Tuxedo Cat, for my middle son on here. It’s high time he had a name on here for me to call him by.