24 Hours

I only know what I read of the show since we don't have television in that capacity. But I gather it somehow takes the entire season to show you the passage of one very full day.

My 24 hours started at about 5 pm last night. I woke up from a badly needed nap and bonked about in a blearly state for another hour. I must have fed people, but I don't really remember what. It wasn't anything elegant or well developed. I was halfway through a tummy bug and already 24-hours into eating nothing but white rice and apple sauce.

I'd spent the better part of the day working on more of those mini-plays and now I was in a bind. I needed to get some work to my little side project and it was due the next morning. Only, ethically, I owe everything to my Primary Client, so even with this other thing hanging over my head--anyway, you get the idea. I'd just finished the first leg of the triathalon and now I needed to get to work on the next portion. It was at about this time last night--9-ish--that I realized that I was in bigger trouble than I'd thought. I needed to finish three of these math thingies and I thought I'd only had two. I reported to Chris that I'd be up late. He would go on to conveniently forget this and harrass me to go to bed for most of the next five hours. He would then stubbornly stay up as he hates to go to bed first.

So I figured out the best solution possible, embarked on it, finished up around 2:25 in the morning, went to bed, fell asleep maybe 20 minutes later. Got up at 7:00 and roused Max, did something useful with the dogs, distributed peanutbutter to the masses, ate some more white rice, and got back to work. At 12:30 I emailed off the last of that--everything was good. Client was happy. Client did leave little note that she was sending me 5 more of these thingies and could I have them to her by June 5.

If I pull that off, I deserve dinner out or something. You should see what I have due by May 31st. I'm supposed to go to a Memorial Day picnic at a friend's house and I already don't want to. (But I will because I realize I'm being unreasonable.) I suck at putting work aside and "forgetting about it" for a few hours. In fact, my mother is coming by Saturday afternoon and I agreed to a four-hour break from work. This has been worrying me so much that as I stood on my deck this evening worrying about when I was going to get the lawn mowed this weekend, it occurred to me that I could work on the lawn while she was here. She won't mind hanging out outside with the kids while I pick up dog poop, rake, and mow.

Chris is going to LOVE this little development, as he hates yardwork, and I'm going to bug him to help me.

Where was I? Oh, yes. So now it's a bit after noon. I fax off an invoice and made everyone some lunch. I tried a weight watchers frozen meal that looked relatively bland. My stomach did not rebel. Yay! Stomach flu over. I then hit the third leg of my work triathalon. Now I needed to review a bunch of stories, type them into a spreadsheet, get them off to Fedex early enough to have Fedex come to me instead of me going to them. Blessedly, I'd had a friend help me by reading all the books first and I just had to pick and choose what I liked best from her favorites, already matched to themes. 90 minutes later the box was ready to go.

Now, a few weeks ago when I took all the food storage and split it into mylar bags for everyone, I'd run out of places to STORE the mylar bags while I was doing this, so the twins helpfully dumped every plastic tub of toys they own on the floor and I filled them all with mylar bags. As of a week ago, most of those plastic tubs were empty again, but I hadn't gotten around to facing the Mt. Everest of toys on the floor.

In the meantime, Chris had set up a playdate with one of the other SAHD's and it was threatening to rain. They might come back here if it rained. This meant it was time to pick up Mt. Everest.

So, running on fumes, I did. Chris went and got Max from school and Max helped me with all of the vidoes and gaming stuff. It took an HOUR to get the basement ship-shape, but, except for my black hole of an office space, the basement now looks quite nice.

This of course meant that not only did the rain not come, it cleared up and turned quite nice.

I didn't care. I shut the curtains in my room and went to bed. Chris took the kids and went to the park.

When I got up 90 minutes later, my 24 hours were over. I walked to the park, feeling a little post-nap stoned, gathered the gang and took them out to Subway for dinner. I wasn't going to cook, but you don't go straight from white rice to delivery pizza in one day. That's not smart. Subway with the whole gang was fun. The boys were quiet and well-behaved--in large part because after over an hour at the playground with friends, they were all so starved that they couldn't eat fast enough. When my four-year-olds were done with their six-inch subs, they started in on Chris' chips. They frighten me sometimes.

Now here we are, home again, home again, jiggidy jig. I need to write one. last. play. Then I'm off to bed for a full 8 hours.