weekend update.

weekends are supposed to be recuperative, right? well, when you spend your whole week lazing about and go down to the in-laws after your father-in-law has back surgery and your mother-in-law has been at the hospital for essentially a week with him, your weekend is full of tasks that need to be done.

as musicboy described it, i had a "git r done" attitude this weekend.

it's true. what she asked us to do, we did.

i mowed the front and back yard myself. i haven't mowed a lawn in YEARS, possibly decades in fact, and the last time i did it i had horrible memories of awful exertion. while it was HOT and i got BURNT (it did not even occur to me to slather on some sunscreen even though it was 11am on a HOT day), it wasn't bad at all. i even started that beast several times myself (something i had never been able to do with the previous mowers i worked with). 

it was nice to prove that i could do it.

then it was stripping a disgusting castle wallpaper, running errands, and painting in the new house that my in-laws closed on the day or so before my father-in-law's surgery.

(it's HUGE.  i mean incredible. i think the reason it feels so huge is because the ceilings are so high.  but there's a huge amount of yard and just wow. i quite like the house, but i'm not sure it's my kind of house.  i don't know how to explain that, but i loved parts of it and then other parts of it were too posh or too strangely put together for my taste. but then again, i have no idea what my taste is, so there you go.)

then i had to find some internet before midnight to work at OIOHL, which i found at a mcdonalds. 

by the end of that saturday, i was exhausted. 

it didn't get much better (sleep isn't good for the sunburned, especially when sharing a too-small bed) and then it was spending two hours with six or seven two-year-olds who were not having good days. it seemed like every single one of them had some sort of meltdown.  one of them, though, got better through cuddles, so that was redeeming. 

but my weekend was exhausting, is my point.

even still, i was so glad to have done it.  i felt like losing myself in service was exactly what needed to be done.  if that meant sweating and burning and painting and scraping, so be it. i just wanted musicboy's mom to have some support. 

but i'm tired still and i'm glad that today is the last day of my class at OIOHL.  i have to finalize the dissertation and submit it to the graduate school, sign some papers, and plan some classes.  but mainly i'm just glad to be able to not be beholden to anyone. i'm glad to be able to go to an additional body combat class if i want and incorporate body pump into my life more regularly.  i'm glad to be able to go places and do things for a couple of weeks without worrying about OIOHL, although it really is only two weeks, because a new class begins then.

in fact, two weeks is really all that's left of my summer break. 

i'll have to make good use of it, won't i?