Exhaustion, Inattention, & Frustration

Both my sweetie and I are so worn out, frustrated, and exhausted that we are being less attentive to details than we normally would be.

My mother-in-law was discharged from the hospital this week and my sweetie took her home. He said it was lovely when they pulled in as all the neighbors immediately rushed over to see how she was doing. They helped carry in the home health equipment we'd picked up for her and brought over food to start making dinner. One of the neighbors had cleaned her house while she was gone and picked up all the (slippery) throw rugs from the floors. Another had cleaned up her yard.

My sweetie spent that evening and the next day and a half setting her house up for her recovery. One of the needed changes was non-slip strips on her concrete front stairs and landing. He told me he peeled the paper from the adhesive backing from each one, laid it down on each step, and then smoothed them out....by hand. He didn't even feel the sandpaper texture rubbing off his skin until he was done and looked down to see his palms were bleeding. This is definitely not the sort of mistake he would normally make but did not surprise either of us under the circumstances of late.

Since he got home yesterday, we have been hard at work prepping for another project the bureaucrats are making us have done. A lot of hard physical work needed to be completed this weekend to be ready for a crew tomorrow morning. I finished up what I had to do and turned my focus back to the deck dismantling project, which is also on a tight deadline.

Yesterday, I spent at least an hour with the cordless drill removing what seemed like a million screws from the plywood on the deck. This morning, I planned to start removing the top layer. I knew I'd need a pry bar since a couple of screws were stripped but I soon discovered I'd missed a couple of screws altogether. Of course, I'd left the screwdriver in the house. Because we had to put temporary fencing (chicken wire) across part of the deck so certain trouble-making dogs (ahem, Angel) wouldn't go flying off the edge with a four foot drop-off, I couldn't just walk over to the front door and get the screwdriver. I had to climb back down the ladder and go around.

The extension ladder, however, has a tendency to slip on the slight gravel slope at the base of the deck. My sweetie was busy and I didn't want to interrupt him. I didn't feel like using the smaller ladder I'd set up in the middle of the supports under the decking we'd already removed because that means I have to scoot on my butt underneath the supports to get out. So, I risked going down the ladder without my sweetie there to hold it.

The second I put my weight on it, I knew that was a mistake. It started sliding and I had no choice but to take the ride down with it.

I was very lucky. The fall could have been a lot worse than it was, with a cracked head, broken bones, or twisted knees or ankles. As it was, I did twist my back some and it's pretty sore. One ankle hurts a little but is definitely not twisted. My left forearm got scraped up and my right elbow took a hard hit with some tweaking to that wrist as well. I've cracked the right elbow before (and broken that wrist in a separate incident) and I don't believe I did that level of damage this time.

Unfortunately, the pain I do have means I won't be able to do any work on the deck removal for several days and my sweetie's "vacation" is over tomorrow. There is no way we will meet our deadline, so I've got to hope the bureaucrats will be understanding and extend it. My biggest challenge is going to be remaining civil to them when I make the call. We are expending a great deal of our own personal time and energy, not to mention money, dealing with all this stuff rather than spending our time, energy, and resources on more useful things like setting up rainwater harvesting or gardens!

When will life get back to normal again? When will we have the time to just wake up and go for a hike instead of working to meet someone else's deadline? When will I be able to enjoy seeing the birds in my yard instead of feeling bitter about how this has all turned out? Katie tells me "life is too short" and I agree, but we still have to do all this stupid stuff to satisfy someone else's demands.