five minutes. first complaining. then not.

One of my friends has this system about complaining.

(I think it’s Emma.  But I could be wrong.)

She looks at her watch and says, “Okay.  You have five minutes.  Complain about whatever you want.  Say every bad thing you want to say.  Get it all out of your system.  But you have to stop at five minutes.”

(Or maybe she says thirty seconds.  Who can remember the details?)

What I’m really trying to say is –

I have a bad attitude.

I want to complain and I want to wallow in it.

(Which is pretty much how I’ve spent my entire wasted day, if you want to know the truth.)

So I am setting the timer on my phone and I am going to allow myself five minutes to rant.

(Seriously.  The timer is actually set.  I am a complainer.  I am not a cheater.)

Go.

The dog peed on a blanket today right after I heard him whine to go outside but allowed myself to complete another task first.  I guess he showed me.

I think my kids took their cues from me all day because they were complaining and picking at one another for most of the day.  I’m not sure anything went well by their standards today.

I’m mad because I actually got my sorry self out of bed early and ran two miles this morning – something I have been trying to conquer in my lazy summer sleeping-in ways.  And instead of making my day more awesome, I don’t think it had any effect.  Maybe making it less awesome somehow.

I cannot seem to finish ten minutes of school year planning without interruption, which makes it crazy hard to get anything accomplished.

I might have underestimated the copious amount of paperwork that is required to officially homeschool a high school student.

All day long it seems my desires were bumping up against my realities.  I just found myself wanting to be anywhere but home, doing anything but fixing meals and cleaning laundry and wiping faces and creating snacks and reassembling the living room and doing any number of menial tasks of which make up the majority of my day.

My shoulders hurt from the Herculean efforts I gave to mowing our grass with a borrowed push mower that I had to pull to start over and over and over again as it kept quitting every five minutes.

Timer!

Sigh.

That was the whiniest, most pitiful five minutes of writing ever.

And I’m not even going to delete it.

(Although I will allow myself the luxury of a spellcheck button.)

You know, if I remember the game correctly, I think the five minutes (or thirty seconds) has another component that I would prefer to forget.

After the rant, you are supposed to then offer equal amounts of time to positive words.

That might be a lot more difficult.

But since I’m not a cheater, I guess I’ll give it a shot.

(Setting the timer again.  Now, go!)

Mosely and Bergen did have a long spell of happy joint play outside on the swingset today.

London’s math book for third grade arrived in the mail.

I did actually run two and half miles this morning mainly without stopping.  That’s pretty great for me.

Riley’s back home with us after a week and a half at Emma and Jon’s and we missed her.

Otto Fox wanted to have extended cuddles today and that is quickly becoming an activity of the past.

I researched chicken breeds today for our little coop and we might be able to acquire said coop residents tomorrow.  And we discovered the cutest breed of chickens ever – Silkies.  I have never thought chickens were cute, just functional.  (I only want what they can give me really.)  But these Silkies are actually almost adorable.

I had delicious farm fresh tomatoes on my grilled cheese sandwich.  (A delicacy introduced to me by one Maggie Wickstrum.)

I was able to keep the laundry basket from overflowing today by completing two loads of laundry while on the phone with a friend.

I chatted with that friend today – that’s always a special treat.

Timer!

Thank goodness.

That not-complaining part was getting tricky.

You know what?

That’s all I have for today.

A little personal writing therapy since Kevin works into the evenings during the summers and therefore I cannot leave my house to seek therapy of the retail variety nor therapy of the dessert variety.

Thanks for indulging me.

And I hope to goodness that your attitude today was better than mine.