Waking up before 6 a.m. and seeing Scott is already in his favorite zombie shirt prowling around looking for stuff to do until the sun comes up is kind of irritating, but I'm ignoring it. I keep telling myself that twenty years of early rising workaholic is probably better than twenty years of couch potato sloth. Click the pic if you want this t-shirt, too.
I've been tearing through the house this spring myself, more than the usual spring cleaning. When I was lead over middle pad in retail (intimates, accessories, jewelry), I got really good at tearing through piles of repackage, reticket, restock, and moving large amounts of merch around, so hitting my laundry room this week was kind of fun, looks like I have a new laundry room. Last week I tore through our big main bathroom vanity while I deep cleaned, yesterday I tore through pantry shelves, and this weekend I hope to tear through some more stuff. Scott's got our big closet covered, he's obsessive, you'd never know people are living in the house by how neat the closet is. I've had two motivators this year. First, I had to help my dad go through cleaning out some things after my mom died four years ago. Both my parents are pack rats. Not only is doing something like that a drag, it's a very depressing drag. I can't imagine putting my own kids through that, and there's nothing like a cancer scare to shine a floodlight on the junk you might leave behind. Second, if I get any money at all coming in later, we might be able to travel more or even sell and move, and I dearly want to be ready to roll out quickly if life gets a little shinier like that. By the way, I'm not a hoarder. I think it's ridiculous that people whine incessantly about gas going up and down by ten cents a gallon but fail to notice when food prices drop by half during certain times of the year. If I can save fifty cents or a dollar per pound or pint, *heck* yes.
Counting down three more weekends after this one, and then 4 weekends from now I hope to be in Dallas meeting some Snarkalecs and pass the ol' Snark Across America torch. Also counting down to my self-appointed deadline to get all my materials handed in to my publisher. I keep asking for more and more details on my manuscript formatting, kind of feels like pulling teeth because they keep assuring me they 'clean it all up' per se, but that feels like the lazy way to me, like I'm paying a ghost writer to go through a box of mental junk and put it together the way they see fit, and besides, I'm the one who is so insanely picky that I'll go fix a typo I run into from 2008, even if my trackers aren't showing a lot of views on it. My stress seems to have turned a corner, though. I was up and down almost every hour last night for some reason, but my dreams were super cool. I was doubling back through time doing rewrites and highlights, moving people around onto new marks so they would show up in my story, slowly bringing secrets into the spotlight, and the second time back through I ran into both my mom at one point and later some guy who knew her, and they both winked and smiled at me because I'd done a good job making it funny. The things I have to say are twisting me in knots, but the ways I learned to cope are what I want to shine through.