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Creating order out of chaos

November 9, 2010 By

I have realized that in order to make my life less overwhelming, I need to clean house. Literally and metaphorically. I need to clear away some clutter, change some things, make things more organized, rearrange the way I do things.  All of this is causing some pretty intense anxiety.  I look around me at all of the things I need to change in order to make my life – well, livable – and the overriding thought in my head is, “Where the eff do I start???”  Just looking at the chaos that is my life makes my palms go sweaty and my heart rate increase. Fight or flight.  No wonder I want to run all time.

Part of the problem, of course, is not having the time to do just that.  To be honest, that’s really what most of this drive to change my life is about.  I want to have time to run without having to pick between that and sleep. Everything else kind of works out. I come to work, groceries get purchased, bills get paid (sometimes late, admittedly, but not very), homework gets supervised. When I run out of hours in the day, one of two things gets sacrificed: sleep or running.  I need both like I need oxygen, so I cannot do this anymore.  I have to get my life together so that I’m not making such ridiculous choices.

So I’ve decided to make a list. First to be sorted out, simply because it’s easiest, will be my physical space. My desks both at home and at work are far more chaotic than they need to be.  Part of it is that I am (I admit it) a naturally disorganized person.  Part of it is my fear of throwing anything out.  Hey, you never know! Someday I might need that piece of paper with squiggles drawn on it!  I’m going to be ruthless.  If I don’t need it, it goes. If I do need it, it gets put away somewhere instead of cluttering up my desk.

Then I will get up to date with bills.  I’m not really behind on this, but I have a small pile of stuff that needs to be paid. I will get it done and file those bills away. One thing I do have going for me is an organized filing system. Any forms that need to be filled in and signed, the photo order for George’s school pictures, the invoices to be completed so I can get my respite funding cheques.  All of the admin that needs to be done will be done.

I have one more year of bookkeeping to do for Gerard’s business, and one year for the non-profit studio.  That will be done. I have set up a quick and easy system for doing this. It will take less than two hours in total. Then our taxes will be officially caught up and all I will have to do is stay current.

I will file away all of the receipts that have been recorded by my friend’s daughter (a real life-saver, that girl – thanks, Megan!).  I will gather together the receipts that need to be done and give them to her. I will come up with a better way of filing the receipts once they have been entered in the spreadsheet.

Starting tonight, I will be going to bed no later than 10:30.  That is a hard target, a set-in-stone rule that only a sick or distressed child will have the power to break. That means that when I wake up at five thirty tomorrow morning, I will have the energy to actually get out of bed and go for a run.

I will work on my daily routines, and find ways to use my time more effectively.  If that means using time timers and putting whiteboard schedules on the wall, so be it. I am even going to take the plunge and find a therapist. This is really something I should have done a long time ago. A few years ago, I went through a number of major life changes in a short period of time. In the space of eighteen months, I stopped working, my Dad died, my younger son was born, and I was hit with George’s autism diagnosis. With all of that plus some pretty intense post-partum depression, it’s no wonder my mind got a little scrambled and overwhelmed. I did see a doctor who put me on antidepressants, but that did not work for me.  The depression and anxiety were replaced by anger, and that didn’t help anyone.

I’m not in as bad a shape as I was in back then.  In fact, I’m pretty happy with the big picture of my life right now. But still. I could use a little help, and I’m going to seek it out.  Just about everyone I know is in therapy – if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!

As for the running, that will get better too.  I have discovered a running club in my neighbourhood, and this past Sunday I went out running with them.  I had a great time, and thoroughly enjoyed meeting real-life people (as opposed to Internet people) who share a common interest with me. My plan will be to go for Sunday long runs with them, which means I will have to do my midweek runs to keep up my fitness so I can keep up with them!

So, a lot is going to be changing in my life.  And that’s not even counting the fact that I’ll be getting married in a few months!

Filed Under: life Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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Creating order out of chaos

November 9, 2010 By

I have realized that in order to make my life less overwhelming, I need to clean house. Literally and metaphorically. I need to clear away some clutter, change some things, make things more organized, rearrange the way I do things.  All of this is causing some pretty intense anxiety.  I look around me at all of the things I need to change in order to make my life – well, livable – and the overriding thought in my head is, “Where the eff do I start???”  Just looking at the chaos that is my life makes my palms go sweaty and my heart rate increase. Fight or flight.  No wonder I want to run all time.

Part of the problem, of course, is not having the time to do just that.  To be honest, that’s really what most of this drive to change my life is about.  I want to have time to run without having to pick between that and sleep. Everything else kind of works out. I come to work, groceries get purchased, bills get paid (sometimes late, admittedly, but not very), homework gets supervised. When I run out of hours in the day, one of two things gets sacrificed: sleep or running.  I need both like I need oxygen, so I cannot do this anymore.  I have to get my life together so that I’m not making such ridiculous choices.

So I’ve decided to make a list. First to be sorted out, simply because it’s easiest, will be my physical space. My desks both at home and at work are far more chaotic than they need to be.  Part of it is that I am (I admit it) a naturally disorganized person.  Part of it is my fear of throwing anything out.  Hey, you never know! Someday I might need that piece of paper with squiggles drawn on it!  I’m going to be ruthless.  If I don’t need it, it goes. If I do need it, it gets put away somewhere instead of cluttering up my desk.

Then I will get up to date with bills.  I’m not really behind on this, but I have a small pile of stuff that needs to be paid. I will get it done and file those bills away. One thing I do have going for me is an organized filing system. Any forms that need to be filled in and signed, the photo order for George’s school pictures, the invoices to be completed so I can get my respite funding cheques.  All of the admin that needs to be done will be done.

I have one more year of bookkeeping to do for Gerard’s business, and one year for the non-profit studio.  That will be done. I have set up a quick and easy system for doing this. It will take less than two hours in total. Then our taxes will be officially caught up and all I will have to do is stay current.

I will file away all of the receipts that have been recorded by my friend’s daughter (a real life-saver, that girl – thanks, Megan!).  I will gather together the receipts that need to be done and give them to her. I will come up with a better way of filing the receipts once they have been entered in the spreadsheet.

Starting tonight, I will be going to bed no later than 10:30.  That is a hard target, a set-in-stone rule that only a sick or distressed child will have the power to break. That means that when I wake up at five thirty tomorrow morning, I will have the energy to actually get out of bed and go for a run.

I will work on my daily routines, and find ways to use my time more effectively.  If that means using time timers and putting whiteboard schedules on the wall, so be it. I am even going to take the plunge and find a therapist. This is really something I should have done a long time ago. A few years ago, I went through a number of major life changes in a short period of time. In the space of eighteen months, I stopped working, my Dad died, my younger son was born, and I was hit with George’s autism diagnosis. With all of that plus some pretty intense post-partum depression, it’s no wonder my mind got a little scrambled and overwhelmed. I did see a doctor who put me on antidepressants, but that did not work for me.  The depression and anxiety were replaced by anger, and that didn’t help anyone.

I’m not in as bad a shape as I was in back then.  In fact, I’m pretty happy with the big picture of my life right now. But still. I could use a little help, and I’m going to seek it out.  Just about everyone I know is in therapy – if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!

As for the running, that will get better too.  I have discovered a running club in my neighbourhood, and this past Sunday I went out running with them.  I had a great time, and thoroughly enjoyed meeting real-life people (as opposed to Internet people) who share a common interest with me. My plan will be to go for Sunday long runs with them, which means I will have to do my midweek runs to keep up my fitness so I can keep up with them!

So, a lot is going to be changing in my life.  And that’s not even counting the fact that I’ll be getting married in a few months!

Filed Under: life Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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Running in the concrete jungle of life

October 22, 2010 By

I suffer from the age-old, clichéd, and frankly boring problem of being a woman with not enough hours in the day. I find myself going to bed ridiculously late and not getting enough sleep, and from time to time I wonder why this is. Am I really that busy or do my time management skills just suck? In analyzing this question, I decided to draw up a rough schedule of what happens in a typical day.

6:00 – 7:15    Wake up, get myself dressed and ready, get James dressed and ready.
7:15 – 7:30    Take James to daycare
7:30 – 8:45    Commute to work
8:45 – 4:45    Earn my keep
4:45 – 6:15    Commute home
6:15 – 7:30    Cook dinner, eat dinner, get kids to eat their dinner
7:30 – 8:00    Supervise George’s homework, read library books with both boys
8:00 – 9:00    Get kids bathed and into bed. Throw load of laundry into washing machine. Make sure car is locked. Make tea.
9:00 – 9:30    Get clothes ready for myself and kids for the following day. Make George’s lunch. Ensure kids’ backpacks contain homework, library books to be returned, forms to be returned to teachers, etc.
9:30 – 10:00    Clean up kitchen. Unload and load dishwasher. Turn dishwasher on and wash any dishes that don’t fit in dishwasher. Get coffee machine ready for the following morning.

What this means is that in the evenings, it’s around ten before I can even sit down at my computer and read emails. This is why I have given up on all of the Facebook games that end in “ville”. I just never have enough time to check on my farm, or my kitchen, or my pet. FarmVille – crops keep dying. FrontierVille – weeds keep growing. PetVille – pet keeps running away to the pound. You get the picture. So now, my Facebook games are the ones that I can spend five minutes or less on, where I won’t suffer penalties if I neglect them for five days.

Do you notice anything missing in the schedule above? Running. Where am I supposed to find time to run? If my daily timetable is anything to go by, my only options are (a) go running in time to be back by six in the morning, or (b) go running after ten at night. Option (b) isn’t really an option to me, because I would be worried about safety.  Something tells me that a woman running alone at that time of night would not be the smartest idea. So I’ve been going with option (a), getting up at 5:00 a.m., being out on the road by 5:15, and trotting back into my driveway by around 6:10 or so.

Except lately, this hasn’t been working out too well. George has been having issues sleeping – a phenomenon very common to children with autism. On any given night, there is roughly a fifty/fifty chance of him – and thereby me – actually getting a full night’s sleep. On the nights he wakes up, he crawls into bed next to me and plays with my hair. No matter how many times I gently move his hands away from my head, they always find their way back there, and he wraps it around his fingers, scrunches it up in his hands, sniffs it, strokes it, on and on and on until he drifts back to sleep. On the good nights, this lasts for half an hour or so. On the bad nights, it will go on for two or three hours.

It doesn’t matter how dedicated a runner you are. If you have a small child keeping you awake from 2:30 until 4:30, it is going to be near-impossible for you get up at 5:00, go running, and then put in a full day of work. It’s not even as if George’s nocturnal adventures are an occasional thing.  For the last month or so, it has been happening two or three nights a week.

It is hammering me, and I am increasingly stressed out by my inability to find time to run. Not running is not an option. Running late at night when I feel vulnerable is not an option. Running first thing in the morning when I’ve had no sleep is not an option.  So I have to get creative.

To solve the problem, I started by considering each run individually. I run five days a week, with Mondays and Fridays off. The weekend runs are not a problem: even if I have to get up early for those, I have the option of vegetating in front of the TV for the rest of the day (true, I’d have two kids jumping on me, but still). That takes care of four days of the week right there. On Wednesdays I go running with a group after work (kills my Wednesday evening schedule but I can live with that once a week), and I’ve worked out that I could do my Tuesday runs on a treadmill at the gym at lunchtime.

All of a sudden, the problem is a lot more manageable. Now, all I have to worry about are the Thursday runs. I’m still not too sure what I will do about those, but I’ll figure something out, either by just living with the early-mornings-after-no-sleep once a week or by doing some kind of creative reorganization to my schedule.

It just goes to show: when the running bug bites you, somehow you find a way to fit it all in.

Filed Under: life, running Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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I never could get the hang of Thursdays

October 21, 2010 By

I’m having one of those days. You know, the kind where you realize, by ten in the morning, that if you make it to dinnertime without breaking a leg and accidentally causing a twelve-car pileup on the highway, it will be nothing short of a miracle. Just one of those days where a lot of irritating little things pile up to create one big jumble of irritation.

I overslept this morning.  By more than an hour. I woke up about ten minutes after I should have been walking out of the house. I should have seen it coming, really. I haven’t slept well for about two weeks, and last night my head was literally buzzing with exhaustion. My body was bound to crash and burn sooner or later.

It was the sound of James crying that woke me up. He had woken up thirsty and no-one had given him his morning milk. Of course they hadn’t.  The customary milk-getter was slumbering away, oblivious to everything, while the customary milk-gettee waited patiently – and in vain. When the sound of the crying pierced my somewhat sluggish consciousness, I glanced at the clock, had about thirty-seven panicky thoughts in three milliseconds (all variations of the same theme, which was: “Oh, crap!”), and flew out of bed.

I got James his milk and warned him that things were about to get really chaotic. Into the bathroom, hair brushed into a big-haired, frizzy mess (no time for the hair-straightener), makeup perfunctorily applied, back into the bedroom, clothes thrown on, brief pause in frenzied activity for the purpose of breathing. Somewhere during all of this I tossed James’ clothes at him and hurriedly pleaded with him to put them on. James, who is used to me being a bit slow and dim-witted first thing in the morning, was stunned into compliance.

As I walked by my desk, I saw a note from James’ teacher with a list of what was needed for today’s field trip to a farm. Quickly, I scanned the list to make sure I had taken care of everything. Yes, I had dug out a pair of rubber boots for James to wear while trudging through the pumpkin patch.  Yes, I had put mitts and a scarf in his bag in case it got cold. Yes, I had supplied a plastic bag for the pumpkin that James would pick out. No, I had not made him a packed lunch.

I never make packed lunches for James. There is a snack program at his school, and he gets lunch and afternoon snack at the daycare. The one day that I actually have to make him a packed lunch (and of course, forget), just has to be the one day on which I oversleep.  Go figure. So I grabbed bread, margarine, and slices of cheese, and somehow managed to arrange all of this into a sandwich without lopping off a finger. Goldfish crackers. A couple of juice boxes.

OK. Packed lunch was made. I was dressed. James was dressed. My travel mug was filled with fresh, hot coffee and ready to go.

Somehow I made it out of the front door with James in tow, fifteen minutes after waking up. If I forgot anything, I don’t know about it yet. I got James to the daycare in time for his breakfast. The transit gods were with me: an express bus pulled up to the bus stop about thirty seconds after I got there. I got to work just twenty minutes or so later than usual.  So, not bad, considering how my morning started.

I returned a couple of phone calls and answered some emails. I reviewed my list of things to do today, and checked my calendar. Only one meeting today. Good. Then I went downstairs to get a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich. The same guy who’s always there took my order.  A breakfast sandwich with bacon and a splash of ketchup, on an English muffin. I get breakfast sandwiches once or twice a week, always ordering the same thing from the same person. He could probably recite my order in his sleep. It’s nice. There’s comfort in predictability.

With coffee and sandwich in my hand, I returned to my desk and called Gerard, my husband-to-be. I wanted to know if the lady from our wedding venue had called him back. She had promised to call us this morning to tell us which of two dates we could have the hall for. I have been waiting for this day, waiting for the answer. It all hinges on one guy who had made a tentative booking on our preferred date, to use the hall for a darts tournament. As it turned out, the lady from the hall did call Gerard, but she didn’t have an answer for us. The darts tournament man is not reachable because he’s gone hunting.

Hunting? What is this, The Clan Of the Cave Bear?

Apparently, we’ll get an answer by the weekend. I don’t want to wait until the weekend.  I want to know now. But there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’ll have to wallow in my frustration for two or three more days.

With the phonecall to Gerard done, I unwrapped my breakfast sandwich, looking forward to the comfort and risk-averse nature of eating something that I’ve eaten dozens of times before. And I was bitterly disappointed.

Sandwich Guy messed up. First, there was the state of the muffin, which can only be described one way: burned. The outer edges of the muffin had actually burned to a crisp. The rest of it was just one step away from being charred. I could also tell right away that the ketchup had been left off. There was no tell-tale smudge of ketchup peeking out from the edge. Worst of all, though, is that instead of bacon, my breakfast sandwich had been made with ham. So much for the comfort of familiarity.

I was faced with a dilemma. Do I eat a sandwich I don’t want and am pretty sure I won’t like? Or do I schlepp downstairs to complain and get a new sandwich made?  After thinking about it for a minute, I reasoned that maybe Sandwich Guy was having a bad day too. Maybe he too had overslept, forgotten until the last second that his kid needed a packed lunch, been late for work, and discovered that the provider of much-anticipated information was off hunting like Indiana-Freaking-Jones.  I also recognized that if I actually did go back downstairs, I’d probably be meaner to Sandwich Guy than the situation called for, and I might make him cry. Not to be judgmental, but he does look like a bit of a cry-baby – um, sensitive person.

So I sat at my desk and half-heartedly ate my burned, ketchup-free, wrong-meat sandwich. I did not enjoy it. The coffee, however, was outstanding.

As I reached under my desk to throw the sandwich wrapper and empty coffee cup into my waste basket, I pulled a back muscle.

I’m starting to think that me and this day just aren’t going to get along.

Filed Under: life Tagged With: , , , ,
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