J. Palmer

This morning (and afternoon, and evening) isn’t (aren’t) going to be going the way I hoped. We have a little girl accompanying us all day. Rhiannon was suspended from school for a few days, due to a nice little tantrum she threw yesterday.

I bought some cinnamon sticks and some cinnamon discs yesterday before I left work. I’m going to try and get myself to cut back on the smoking, if not quit altogether. Ashlee asked me if there was any reasoning behind it other than a self-desired thing–like if she somehow said or had done something to influence me. I told her that I had noticed that for a few months she had been distancing from me or swatting smoke away whenever I had a cigarette–which is true–but that it holds no real bearing on my decision. Honestly, it’s a combination of the state in which I awoke the other morning, plus that loneliness thing that I read the other day.

I guess I want to also set a better example for the children, and be a better person, and so on, et cetera, yada-yada-yada, and pull my sorry ass out of this self hating depressive funk, and be able to be and do everything for every one in what little time I have allotted, so I guess I better try to live healthier and such. I dunno.

He says all that, and lights another cigarette.

I’m thinking about it, though, and that’s a start. And I’ve finally built back the habit of journaling, so there’s something else on the pathway of trying to become a better person, again. I hope.

I wish Ashlee were a part of my blogging/journaling/whatever audience. (Hah! Audience of zero.) I’ve expressed a few times that it would be cool for her to catch some of the thoughts that come out that I somehow fail to share with her, because I end up thinking that they are not worth mentioning to her when we actually have time together. I dunno. She’ll probably never read anything unless I share it with her directly. And that’s probably one of those things where one might feel that if it isn’t mentioned directly, then it must be something private, and privacy should be respected. Thing is, nothing I write–not even the things that I end up flagging as private to keep them out of the view of the rest of the world–is intended to be kept private from her. I want her to see and know all of me. Even this ridiculous tripe.

And, as far as that goes, everything I have that is public facing is what I would want my friends to know–if I had any. Which is part of why I got into keeping an online journal so many years ago. This is an open invitation to nearly anyone and everyone to take a small view into my life, my personality, my being, and see if there is opportunity for a friendship to develop. But, I guess it’s a bit of a stupid dream to think that there would be a chance of that occurring.

Again, not a lot of time this morning. I’ll be taking Nivea to the high school for her shadowing thing, so that means cutting out a little bit earlier than usual. But I’m trying to keep this habit up. I’m glad that it seems that I’ve been able to force myself into writing somewhat regularly, again. It also seems to be helping with my mood and spirits a bit.

I’m also going to attempt to change a few other habits and introduce a few more. Included in that mess is the idea of trying to quit smoking, again. It’s going to be hell.

I sent the kids on the bus this morning, instead of taking them in. They didn’t seem to mind. I took them on Monday–Nivea’s first shadow day. I’d thought about taking them, but it seemed that none of them were aware of Nivea’s shadowing thing, so I figured I’d just keep things easier for me. This way, I only need to manage my way up to the hilltop and back down, instead of up, down, and looping back round through town. I’ll just end up a little early for work, because I won’t have enough time to come back home. Monday was kind of awesome in that respect, as I was scheduled in an hour later than usual, so I had time to come back home.

My neck and left shoulder hurts. Sleep hasn’t been all that great, recently.

I’m somehow planning on cramming a ton of housework into tomorrow, as well as shopping for supplies, doing some absentee voting, getting an eye exam, and hopefully squaring away a few billing and scheduling issues with Violet’s therapist. I’m not really looking forward to all of that. I need another day off.

I need a vacation.

I wish I could burn up some of my PTO whenever I wanted, but I have to save it to align with time that Ashlee has put it. A selfish part of me wants to scream, “It’s my time, I can use it when I want,” but I know that doing so would be to the detriment of the family. I just need to hang on long enough to working with the company to get into the same bracket of earnings as Ashlee. Of course, once I hit that, I’m pretty sure she’ll be bumping up into a higher bracket, so we’ll never match, and I’ll still end up having to take time whenever I can have it meet something of hers.

I hope I have a decent day at work, today. I hope that maybe they’ll send me home. Yes, I keep holding out for that stupid thought.

I need to check on my garden. It got pretty cold last night. I’m taking the gardening slightly more serious this year, but I’m still looking at it with the attitude of throw seeds in the dirt and see what happens.

Well, I reckon it’s time to go.

I figured out how to auto-generate a title for when I’m too lazy to come up with one for my WP posts. I’m using a little snippet of code I found here.

The only notable differences are that I changed my date formatting, and added ‘post_name’ => ” to the update array in order to set a slug based off the title instead of going with the post ID.