Andy

The Clock Strikes Midnight

My parents just walked in the door a few minutes ago, and the house officially has turned back into a pumpkin... or something. I am going to miss my independence, even if a lot of it was illusory. I am kinda happy to even be saying this given my less than stellar experiences during trips over the past few years.

This past week was very rough I must say, but I don't really blame the trip for that so much as a weather shift combined with a taxing x-ray and bloodwork appointment, some difficulties with interruptions during my morning routine the day following, and a few other issues. I have rough patches a-plenty when my parents are here, so I still am coming out of this feeling like I accomplished a little something.

Some assessments about the past month:

• I had roughly a week's worth of feeling really good over the past 3.5-4. I didn't have it all lumped together. I haven't had really any days of feeling good for a while, maybe years, so this was a big win for me.
• While I had a few logistical issues with organizing meals and ingredients for meals, on the whole I ate very well and was not stressed out about it. My problem spots mostly fit into the "things going bad before I could use them" area as opposed to the "I don't have enough supplies" area. Times when I had issues with the latter I was able to improvise rather painlessly.
• Over the 25 or so days of this trip, I was able to complete web updates for sites I maintain in a timely manner, but only on 2 of those days was I really able to work on my own projects, and for fairly limited spans of time.
• I decided to postpone my UMUC school enrollment largely on account of this trip combined with everything else that has happened this year. I am confident that this was the correct decision, and I hope that I can regroup for the spring semester.
• I did better on the days when people were not here for the most part. In the long term this would not hold true by virtue of my running out of supplies and ways to eat, keep the house in order, and so on, but given the supplies I had at the outset of this trip, I was, on average, able to expend less energy on the days where nothing was scheduled. I am not really factoring in the other benefits of visitors in this point, and those are significant.
• I need more tools to help me live alone for a long span of time. It would only take one thing to go wrong for many things to be destroyed, and there were many facets of life that I simply did not attempt to consider, like keeping up the lawn, making sure the water purification system was working, and so on. I discovered one or two helpful approaches during this trip, so that is a plus. I also need way more things to prepare food-wise in order to make the situation viable in the long-term.
• I really did have fun during a substantial portion of this trip time. I felt good about a lot of things about which I do not often get to feel good, and I was able to carry a positive mindset through many if not all of the harder situations as well.

I thank all of you who came down to help out over the course of this trip. Between people stopping by with grocery orders after work, people hanging out and bringing carry-out, and all the rest, I was able to manage pretty darned well without feeling an exhorbitant amount of pressure to survive. I even feel like I can plan the big (and long overdue) croquet event for next week if that suits people's schedules.