Dumpage, Pure Dumpage

Bling bling! So I recently discovered that Tracy had also granted me an award, and I had not yet seen her post in which she bestowed this flattering honor onto me. Thanks, Tracy! It's so awesome to feel loved! Especially since I had long ago accepted that I did not expect to win any blogging popularity contests. It's flattering to be recognized by so many of my peers that I've only recently met via blogosphere. It's especially flattering because I haven't been my blogging self these days. I haven't had time to visit or comment at my regular blogs. I haven't had time to write all the posts that I'd love to write. I haven't even noticed that my peers have honored me with recognition and said esteeming things about me at their own blogs. I've been a crappy blog friend. For these reasons, I feel a little guilty about the bling on my blog! I also gotta come up with some good stuff to write about, since apparently a whole lot of people liked hearing about The Neighbors who are NOT (YAY!) my neighbors anymore!

I've also whined a whole lot recently about being so swamped with moving and settling into a new house and trying to climb out of the hole I call "two weeks behind in work." It just so happened that I doubled my work load just before we moved by adding two anger management groups to my summer work schedule. This is good, because I love what I do. This is also good because it doubled my part-time income (handy for times like moving to a new, larger, more expensive home). This boost in work is good for at least ten weeks and probably longer, as I hope I will continue to be contracted to do more groups. I love to do therapy groups. The interpersonal dynamics are so much fun. The only not so good part is the timing of it all. I'm plenty busy without doubling my paperwork and administrative duties right now. I think I need a secretary! Ha! Boy does THAT feel good to say. For several years post-college, pre-becoming-what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up, I WAS a secretary of sorts. I just had glorified names like "Senior Secretary," "Administrative Assistant," "Program Coordinator." There's no shame in doing this kind of work, it's just that I was really bored and discouraged because this was not what I paid an ungodly amount of money for in college. I guess that's what happens to people who complete a dual bachelor's degree in classical piano and creative writing. We graduate college neck deep in the cost of loans to pay for an artsy-fartsy degree and then we discover we can't pay the bills with that degree. We then tend to feel miserable as we suffer through jobs that are not in our field of expertise but for which we are still overqualified and underpaid. Some of us, like me, get so bored and miserable, that we enter graduate school for the mere stimulation of it. For me, I also stumbled upon my calling when I took graduate level courses out of boredom. Somehow I started this post with being busy with my work and totally digressed. All my blog posts turn into brain dumps these days.

I'm beginning to see the light. Really, I am. And it's not because I've been to a Billy Graham revival, though some days I feel like I need one. I'm nearly caught up to real time in my work load, and now I just have some old paperwork to catch up on. Like eight treatment plans. I could knock it off in a half a day if I didn't have my full time job, namely MOTHERHOOD, demanding my full attention every minute of every day.

Speaking of motherhood, I've realized that I've been writing a whole lot about myself and not so much about my wee ones lately. So here's a plug. Son is now saying more words than I can count. He is also pushing a couple more teeth out, which helps explain why he was having so much trouble sleeping through the night and napping, which (true to Murphy's Law) coincided nicely with the timing of our move. It's always nice to be doubly exhausted and fatigued and to come a hair's breadth of blacking out at the Stuff-Mart after a bout with two kids' flu bugs, your own flu bug, several days of packing boxes, two solid days of moving, and then trying to purchase groceries to feed your children so they don't starve in your nice big new house. And will ya look at that? I've managed to digress into whining and focusing on myself again.

Somebody, please...either shut me up or shoot me!

Do you ever get near the end of a post and realize it did not go at all the way you intended it to? Do ever feel like you have Attention Deficit issues?

On a final note, I haven't gotten an answer to the circling copters yet, but the new "neighbors" about a half mile up the road (are they really "neighbors" if they are that far away?) said they thought the action was focused on a house behind them where there were apparently also four police cars with the copter. They said this was not the first time. Hmmmmm...may be some new neighbor stories coming along. While there haven't been any more circling copters, there were a couple vultures circling the same area of our woods the very next day. And you know the kinds of things vultures like to circle (do I smell something?).