I lost it last night. Just a little. It all kind of hit me at once, standing there in the bathroom trying to unpack at least one damn box for the day – the fact that the flooring is taking a lot longer than we’d anticipated, and we’ve barely managed to unpack anything as a result; the fact that there is just so damn much to do on this house that’s on the list marked ‘high priority’; the fact that we have not yet sold our old house; the fact that most of my clothes are still in bags and suitcases in a pile because I still don’t have the shelves installed in the closet; the fact that the house is a complete and utter disarray and I cannot find anything because it’s still in a box somewhere and I just cannot stand living in this kind of condition for long periods of time. And what makes it even worse is that my hands and my arms are so sore from dealing with installing flooring, and cleaning the old house, and lifting and hauling boxes and on and on, that I can barely lift anything at all right now – even the lightest of boxes requires two hands because if I use just my right hand, my wrist starts screaming at me. It is all getting to be too completely overwhelming and every time I think we might have an evening to focus on just one thing, something else pops up that gets in the way, and the end result is that it just doesn’t feel like we’re making any progress; and what progress we are making just seems to be taking far too long to accomplish.

Last night I went back to the old house to paint several walls and do a little bit more touch-up on a few others. I got to play with painter’s putty because that little piece of baseboard just refused to go back on straight and I simply did not have it in me to fight with it anymore. So instead I used putty to fill in the cracks and cover up the holes where we’d bolted that bookshelf to the wall, and what do you know, after a coat of paint, you’d never know what a crappy job I did putting that stupid piece of baseboard back on.

I was supposed to go to a Church Council meeting last night, but by the time I was done with the painting and puttying and everything else, the last thing I could think about was having to go sit in a meeting all covered in paint splatters, without falling asleep from sheer exhaustion. So instead I went home, where the electrician was installing the pipe on the outside of the house that will act as the conduit for the two dedicated circuits he’s installing in the room that will be the office, and we put down another section of underlayment for the flooring and Richard tried again to reattach the door strips, with not much success, and eventually we just gave up. There was a program on PBS last night about synchronized swimming, which was fun to watch because it brought back all sorts of memories, so I scrounged up something from the freezer for dinner – good thing I tossed the remainder of the burgers from the Fourth of July in there – and we sort of collapsed on couches in the living room and watched TV and tried to pretend that the chaos in the house would maybe somehow take care of itself.

*(brownie points to anyone who can identify what song the title’s from, considering the song sums up pretty much how I’m feeling at the moment)