A Busy Life Lesson

This month has already seen a large family picnic celebrating our Independence Day, and the occasion was marked by the attendance of my in-laws. It was great having them up and spending time with them. It did much to help the weekend feel like a vacation and not a normal weekend with a special holiday thrown in. Shortly after our July 4th holiday came our second anniversary. This was a mixed event, for on the one hand we both had been given time off in the middle of the week (by some strange "coincidence" given that neither of our bosses knew it was our anniversary until after we had the time off), but on the other we did not have the funds to go away and spend the night. Nevertheless we took a day trip out to the beach one day and spent the second day relaxing. It was quite nice, and neither of us regrets it. On the day of our anniversary I made a trip down to Costco to do the unthinkable: I purchased a wood-laminate floor for my study. There happened to be a fantastic sale and we saved more than 50% of what we were planning to spend on replacing the floor in my study! The hard part was spending the money when the income is still low (oh yes, we are both bringing in money, but neither in a full-time capacity). The harder part was installing the floor Saturday. The floor did not take "long", we got it done in an afternoon/evening, but having to do it in the hot weather was not particularly enjoyable. Still, my floor is in and I am one step closer to using my study, one of the things I have been looking forward to since we bought the house! Sometime last week a "kind" spammer decided to use a distributed attack and fill my blog up with invalid comments, leaving me to clean them up (over 100 of them), and completely disable comments until such time as I can fix them or determine they are worth the hassle. As if this were not enough my wife's computer decided to exert a will of its own and critical files were deleted without our intervention. I spent all of yesterday (minus an extremely disappointing, and quite wasteful church service) trying to recover the system, to no avail. I will have to backup her data and start from ground zero, again.

I am exhausted, and not just physically. Among all of this activity I have left out omissions that are trying my patience. I have been promised two interview-setting phone calls and I have not received even one of them. I am fortunate to have small-time side-work, but I've been looking for full-time opportunities, and when insiders indicate to me that I will make it to an interview . . . it's all so demoralizing to not hear back from those companies.

Sometimes the burdens we choose to bear are too much for us. I cannot be responsible for my wife's machine, and finding a full-time job whilst doing part-time work, and keeping the house in order, and maintaining the yard, and planning events, and. . . . There are some things I will have to choose to give up; I will have to cut back on my lifestyle in order to keep my energy level up. It is one of those little lessons of life.