My Weird Response to a Generally Icky Day

I'm kind of tired and depressed tonight, and that's not good for de blogging.

It wasn't a bad day, exactly, but it was a frustrating one.  I couldn't quite get anything done at work, because everything was interrupted by everything else.  A little after 3 PM, I was trying to finish the biggest interruption, so that I could take care of two other interruptions, and then get back to the main task of the day.  That's when my phone rang.  The roofer - the one that two people recommended, the one that's had money sitting in escrow from our refi for over a month, the one that never responds to my phone calls, and couldn't give me a time frame more specific than a Monday or Thursday in November - THAT roofer! - called.  They'll be out Monday - Halloween! - to replace our roof.  Great! I thought, until I called John.  He was upset with the extremely short notice.  John reminded me that we were told to get a solar company to remove the solar panel that runs down to our water heater before the roofers arrive.  How could we possibly get that done between 3:30 Friday and 6 AM Monday?  The solar place initially said the same, but they took pity on me and came out late this afternoon. The cost was $250 plus tax, not including the price of reinstalling it afterward.  Great, more money down the figurative drain.  We have not done one thing we wanted to do with the dwindling cash we took from the refi - and John's worried that we'll never get the chance to do anything much.

I had hoped to have my big new Halloween poem ready for you tonight. I was even compelled to take a break at work today and email a stanza to myself before I forgot it.  But by the time I looked at my notes after work, the words barely made sense to my tired brain.  Maybe I'll have it for you Sunday.  I just can't work on it tonight.

The nasty, negative part of my brain, the part that seems to be in control tonight, says that it doesn't matter anyway.  I expected to get more readers and more comments from the two VIVI nominations, but since the initial flurry I've been getting fewer comments than I usually get during a normal week. Wah!  Nobody loves me any more!  Entries I was really proud of got one comment each.  I've taken to thinking that posting two entries in a day actually decreases the readership for each, and that most people won't check out the fiction and poetry nominees anyway, because they think they don't like poetry.  With all those categories to vote for, maybe they'll spend their limited time before voting ends looking at the major categories, the fun categories, the "Part One" categories. Maybe I annoyed people by saying that I wasn't going to try to comment in every single nominated journal. Maybe I violated the Unwritten Law of Blogging - whatever that might be! 

Now, I know as well as anyone that this kind of negative thinking is foolish and destructive.  "Remember the lurker factor!" Carly tells me.  People are spread thin right now, sampling as many nominated journals as possible, I tell myself.  Alerts are wonky, so we may be missing each other.  But I still feel rejected and neglected.  Pout.

So what am I going to do about all this - the bad monetary/logistic news and the defeatist head trips, the poem that evades me, sleep deprivation and general depression? 

I'm going to write a few limericks and show you some sunset pictures.  What else?

Gruesome Limericks
by Karen Funk Blocher

A young ghost who haunted New York,
Met this fate being stabbed with a fork.
The fork it was pitch-
And the victim, a witch,
Was accused of inventing the "spork!"

A mystery writer was proud
He with such great ideas was endowed.
'Til his play about murder
Involving a birder
Was restaged by "Kill Willie" O'Dowd!

There was a young zombie named Clyde,
Who once gave a black cat a ride.
But the cat it kept clawing,
And Clyde's innards kept falling,
So he'd stop and stuff parts back inside!

Pirates, searching for wealth beyond measure,
Found a map once that promised rare treasure.
But as they were digging,
A fire to their rigging
Was set, for their rivals' great pleasure!

Madeleine Millicent Blair
Was a vampire extraordinaire,
'Til she met a young slayer
With a headache (no Bayer),
And ended as dust in her hair.

And somewhere in there is another clue to this year's Halloween costume.

The one good thing that happened today was that I left work at exactly the right time to get lots and lots of good sunset pictures.  You know it's a great sunset when the sky is pink with clouds, and there's color in every direction you look.  (The shot of the Catalina Mountains, for example, faces north.)  Enjoy!  And comment, darn yuhs!

Karen

P.S. A nice person commented before I even finished fixing the typos in this entry.  Hooray!  I feel better already.  But do say hello anyway, won't you? Thanks!

P.P.S.  Well, I've looked at all the nominated journals in the first ten categories, with more of the same planned for Saturday and Sunday. I already have one category in which I could not narrow it down to one choice, so I'll have to look again later.  Several other categories were really tough also, with two or more journals I'd like to vote for. There really are a lot of great journals out there. I just wish I had time to keep up with them all. [Yawn]  Good night!