Day 172: on a (mostly) salvaged tuesday

I got the phone calls I needed to take care of out of the way this morning. One of them required me to get up at 7am to wrangle, but I did it, and went back to bed after feeding the cats. I'm amazed they let me sleep in till 10am; I guess Inkblot has learned his lesson, and is not so obsessed about making his morning rounds.

Thirty minutes before the alarm goes off, I'm willing to make an early start to it and enjoy Quiet Time. Three hours before our usual wake up time, not so much.

Once I was finished with the calls, I found myself unclenching and coming up for air. The worst is behind me. I still have some "distasteful" calls to make, but I'm spacing them out in order of priority, and they will get easier as I go. Thus do I ease out of "Survival Mode" and re-anchor myself in a more pleasant reality.

Himself's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy appointment was today. I like the doctor Himself was assigned to. Were it possible, I would be asking this doctor to be my therapist, but that's not his gig. He does set a nice standard for me to use in finding one, though.

We went directly home today, in order to avoid the afternoon/evening commute traffic, and were mostly successful. We stopped at Trader Joe's for a hot minute, then came home. Imagine my surprise when I spied a grasshopper staring at me from behind one of the glass panels of our back door! He was hiding from a marauding Huntress, and with some trial and error, I helped him make his getaway. The cats were disappointed. Oh well. ;)

I had a late lunch/early dinner, got the Queen Mother's dinner together, then brought order to a bit of chaos over by our computer desk. Most of it went into the recycling bags. I took a bit of satisfaction in my effort.

While the Queen Mother watched her usual hour of news, I did a bit of informal meditation. The first track that came up when I brought up Pandora happened to last half an hour, so I rested and did some deep breathing along with the music. It focussed my attention quite well, as I observed the usual mental chatter was staying muted in the background. I paid it no mind. (ha ha)

I wound up having some lentil soup and a salad for supper, then loaded up the dishwasher, turned the knob - and nothing. Himself checked the circuit breaker, came and turned the knob - and still nothing. Our dishwasher has given up the ghost. We've made initial plans to do some tag-team dish washing on Thursday, when Himself has a breather between appointments. Good thing I had meditated earlier!

The mountain is getting steeper and more challenging to climb. I'm hoping this means I'm getting closer to the top.