Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Even when I schedule rest days, I have a hard time allowing myself to do nothing. I wind up, late on a Saturday, saying "at least I made lunch/took out the trash/paid some bills." Recovering from surgery, I can cut myself slack on the days when I'd have to fill in "drank tea" in that slot, or at best "made myself tea while cattitude was at work.

I don't know whether this will carry over when I'm well but really need a rest day to maintain that.

I also note that I have posted this only at a point when I have started doing stuff beyond the basic self-maintenance.

I'd been thinking about organizing social stuff this weekend, and cancelled it today in favor of some serious doing nothing. I need the rest, and maybe to try to scare off this congestion and remnant muscle ache. A chunk of the latter is almost certainly tension. Yes, my new boss likes me. Yes, I can do the work. It's still a new job, learning some new stuff--both in terms of software, and what they actually want me to do (and how much of it). Plus, probably, various other new stuff. So, source of stress--even desired job changes are somewhat stressful for most people.

I will leave the house tomorrow, at least briefly, during the day--that's part of basic redbird maintenance. I will try to avoid anything physically or emotionally strenuous, and remind myself that it's okay for me to do almost nothing.

This was supposed to be a rest day, which I hadn't really gotten last weekend. (No, adrian_turtle didn't run me ragged, but there were some nice long walks, and carrying bags of groceries and such, and those long bus rides aren't the most restful thing in my life.)

In the sense of minimal physical exertion, it was. (And, on the short wanders outside, I not only enjoyed some fine spring weather, I saw violets and the first goslings of the season.)

However, I've done more cooking than I planned, in part because cattitude wasn't up for it. In addition to making us lunch, I made a batch of lemon ice cream while he was napping, then fish stock (because he didn't have the energy), and then I baked us fish for dinner. So I am well fed, and there are several containers in the freezer with labels that say "FISH" (because confusing that with the poultry stock seems a bad idea, moreso than confusing the duck and chicken would be, though the duck is also labeled).

Somewhere in there, the timer switch on the ice cream maker broke. I wound up turning it off with a pair of pliers (and think I did so too soon), and have email in to the Cuisinart company, because "replacement switch" isn't on the list of parts they offer on their Web site. A new paddle, lid, motor arm, or canister, yes. I'm hoping this is because it's trivial and they'll just say "here you go" rather than that they aren't prepared to handle this issue. (It's plastic, and broke in a way that is almost certainly not glueable, at least not usefully or stably.)

I also did some freelance proofreading, but that doesn't even require me to stand up, let alone lift anything heavy or fragile. So, again, it's work, but feels okay to have done today, though a full day's proofreading would not have been.

When julian_tiger updated his journal to tell everyone about his fine, fierce new game, he didn't mention that he'd drawn blood. I think he doesn't know, because I pulled the hand well away before it started bleeding.

It wasn't a lot of blood--but he left me with three scratches, on two different fingers. Add that to the cut on a third finger (also on the left hand) from the breadknife over the weekend, and I had a lot of bandages on last night. I've removed them all, because they interfere with keyboarding and I'm no longer bleeding, but it's another argument for taking today easy. The main argument is simply that I'd run around from Friday through Tuesday--two long bus rides, computer shopping, socializing, and the zoo--and need the rest. It is a very good thing that the current project lets me work at home: I'm not sitting in bed all day, I'm working (I hope productively) while I drink my tea.

If we play that game again--and we may, he liked it--I'm wearing protection, either garden gloves or oven mitts.

This is my first day of real rest in a couple of weeks--which is less than I generally need to take. And my father's funeral was yesterday, a swarm of cousins I see every decade and friends and colleagues of my father's who I hadn't seen in longer than that. My father and I weren't close, to put it mildly, but that doesn't mean the day wasn't stressful (and no, nobody was expecting him to die this soon). I had four living grandparents until my senior year of high school; my mother is now my only surviving direct ancestor (I have three aunts).

So I'm eating lots of chocolate, doing not much else, and being vaguely distracted. And that's okay. If I don't pull myself together by 6:15 Monday morning, I have my job's okay to be out for a few days. (I won't get paid for them, which is a problem, but I won't be risking unemployment, either.)

Thanks to those of you who've offered condolences or an ear (those of you who are puzzled, this is because my last few posts were friends-only); particular thanks to papersky, who gave me a useful framework for thinking about the last couple of days and my reactions to them. And, as always, to cattitude, who is very good at just being there for me.