No Time to Breathe

"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom."
- Thomas Carlyle

I hit the wall last night when I got home from a clinic board meeting after ten o'clock. I was tired and stressed. Even after watching an hour of American Idol starting at eleven, I couldn't turn my brain off in my otherwise aching body. I tossed and turned and thought of all the things I needed to do today. Sometime in the wee hours, I finally fell asleep.

I started my day with an appointment at the Village Spa. My poor feet have been sadly neglected. I haven't had any inclination to get pedicured in these past few months - especially when I started to lose my blackened toenails, courtesy of the 60k walk I did in September. But as Merv and I are headed to Mexico on the weekend, I bit the bullet and went to try and have my feet put in some semblance of decency. It hurt. When I left the spa I headed to the grocery store to buy food for the gathering of ten friends Jacob was hosting tonight. Then, I was off to the dentist.

My scheduled hygiene appointment and minor filling turned into a training session for the dental staff on dental damming techniques. The filling which should have taken about ten minutes, took an hour. By the time the dentist was done, my jaw was aching, my tongue was cut and I was a nervous wreck. I didn't stay for the hygiene appointment. The staff felt so bad about my experience that they would not accept payment for the filling. That says something about how truly bad the experience was.

After I left the clinic, I picked up Jacob, Sara and her friend JJ and we headed off to lunch. An hour later, I drove them to meet their friends at their old high school. When I got home, I tackled some pressing work that I was on a short deadline to meet. While doing that Geraldine came by to borrow my carpet steamer. While sharing a cup of tea with Ger, Sara called and requested that I pick her up and drive her to another school so she could watch her brother Carlo's basketball game. After I dropped her off, I gassed up my car and ran it through the car wash so that it would be presentable when I picked Stan and his mother up to drive them to the theatre. After that excursion, I came home to complete some other work that needed to be done by tomorrow morning and then prepare dinner for all the kids. Clean up duties ensued. It is now after eleven and there is still work to do. Most of Jacob's friends have left but there are still a few remaining. Once they go, I will do a cursory pickup downstairs. Dear God, I'm tired.