(written on the 11th [and 20th] from notes taken yesterday)
Not much to write about today. I wasn’t very good at making it a good Mother’s Day for my mom. 😕
I got up, listened to some uplifting music, chatted with the big guy, watched some house framing videos to be better prepared for possible stuff I’ll be doing once I get back to South Dakota, and got myself a shower (thx, mama 😊🙏¹).
After showering, I found one of my little t pins and used it to clean out her shower head, as it was pretty choked off from mineral buildup. In fact, many of the jets were completely plugged or partially plugged, and so not only was it harder to rinse soap off, but also the jets that did have water coming out were thin and prickly.
Much better now. 😊 🙏²
I watched some more framing videos and spent a heck of a long time trying to remember what I’ve done the last few days, so I could catch up on my journal entries.
Obviously, having to catch up on my journal is a fairly regular occurrence, but when I’m not traveling around from place to place, it’s a lot harder to isolate the memories to particular days: So much just blends together.
Gosh, I wish I could just get myself to write every night before I went to bed like I used to do.
[sigh]
I used to do that without fail. Didn’t matter if I got home at 3:00 in the morning.
I was dedicated. Disciplined.
I wasn’t going to let my head hit my pillow until I had written in my journal for the day.
I want to get that discipline back. Both for personal growth, as well as for pure efficiency. 😅
Since I hadn’t even taken notes, I spent a whole bunch of time retracing my steps on my Google stalker app, reading back through text messages, and looking at my phone call records.m, etc.
So. Much. More. Effort.
I think I spent hours in that effort today without even really getting much of any actual writing done. Of course, I could just skip days, but I know how I am when I skip days. If I find a reason to justify skipping one day, be it exhaustion, or whatever, then I’ll skip another, and another; and pretty soon I’ll have skipped six months in a row.
😬
That’s just what happens. I’ve got a lifetime as a track record to look back on. I know myself. Streaks broken, for me, crumble.
Best simply not to break them.
Right now, I have a commitment to write an entry for every day of my life, and I’m generally not very good at breaking my commitments; so even though I get way behind, I bust my butt to catch up, because I’ve made a commitment to myself to write an entry for every. single. day.
So why not just make a commitment to write every night before bed again?
I can’t make that commitment, because I know I don’t have the self-discipline right now to make it.
And I can’t go breaking commitments, because then who knows what devastation I’ll unleash on myself once I’ve justified breaking commitments.
I’m sure I’ve broken plenty of commitments before. My brain’s not working very well right now, so I can’t think of any at the moment, but hopefully that’s a good thing, and not just an example of how non-functional my brain is right now. 😅
I was feeling a bit better and went to church with my mom (thx, for the ride 🙏³). For whatever reason, speaking of non-functional brain, it didn’t dawn on me that I was going to be seeing a whole bunch of people that I knew.
I wasn’t quite ready for that today. The only decision that I had in my brain was: Are you going to go to church when you’re just getting over a cold?
I figured I’d go, but I’d sort of stay on the periphery, so as to minimize getting everyone else sick were I still contagious. But then people started showing up who knew me, and wanted to talk and give me a hug and everything, and I totally forgot about that, so I felt bad when my immediate reaction to people at first was “wait wait wait, don’t touch me, I’m sick.”
😅
On a different day, with more brain power and less sickness, I would have totally been all about catching up and giving hugs and what not. Hopefully, nobody felt slighted that I kept myself at arm’s length and wasn’t very chatty.
Speaking of chatting, after sacrament meeting, I did chat a little bit with Colin, and then a lot bit with Eddie. I actually chatted with Eddie for so long that I missed most of elders quorum 😅, so by the time we stopped talking, I wasn’t really wanting to walk into the classroom with only 15 minutes left, so I finished the rest of the time in an empty classroom, journaling I believe.
Once back to my mom’s place, I was pretty exhausted, so I thought maybe I’d take a nap. So I excused myself and headed out to my van to rest, but I ended up just mostly staring at my phone the entire rest of the day.
I spent some more time learning about framing, specifically learning how to frame stairs, as that’s one thing that I’ve never done before. I’ve framed walls and around ducts and windows and doors and whatnot, but I’ve never done stairs.
I also, for whatever reason, let myself get sucked into the YouTube algorithm that, for whatever reason, fed me a bunch of prison documentaries. 😶
😅
Gratefully, I’m feeling better.🙏⁴ My nose isn’t running like a faucet. 🙏⁵🎉 That ended last night, but my sore throat started coming back a little bit after church, and I’m stuffed up a bit, though that’s getting better as well. 🙏⁶
I keep hoping my leg will unnumb itself, So I can cancel my visit to the neurologist, but… no such luck so far. I think some feeling has returned, but I’m also periodically noticing that other parts of my leg are going numb as well, but just for brief bits. Unfortunately, the nerve on the bottom of my foot has been freaking out a heck of a lot more lately, too. 😕
The nerves in my arms have also been going numb a lot quicker than they used to if I lie on my side with my arm holding my head up.
🤷
I guess my body is just wearing out. 😅
But I can still do good, and I had better take advantage of the time I’ve got still, because it’s good that I want to spend my life doing, and as my body wears out, I’ll have fewer and fewer options of what good I’m able to do.
At the end of the day, I wandered back in the house to wish my mom a final happy Mother’s Day. She was on the phone with my brother Richard, so it was done very quietly, and then I headed off to bed for the night.
Oh, I did spend a fair little bit of time messaging my sister Heather trying to come to an understanding of what she has envisioned for her stairs.
And I had one of those lovely superficial self-conscious pangs today, when I was leaning over and could feel all the skin in my face sagging. 😅
The same thing happened once in New Zealand. It’s sort of disconcerting to feel my face sagging when leaning over. 😅
The joys of getting older, and the joys of having made thoughtless choices that sped up the opportunity to face this. 🙃
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 