Busy, Busy, Busy

Sigh.......

You know what happens when you decide to make a change for the purposes of spirituality? You find yourself chucked into the deep end of busy. I kid you not, it's like this magnetic attraction for me. I go from opening up anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes a day for the purposes of spiritual growth only to have something come and eat up those precious minutes.

First it starts with the wonderful family vacation. A necessity as it helps us develop stronger bonds as a family, plus it's fun. We had a blast at Disney World so that was worth it. Then it gets chewed up by housework and getting back into the whole being at home thing. Then you get hired so to speak to do a web site, which is good but doing the layout sketches tends to zap all thought processes out the window because you want to do something that's different, that will help set this site out from all the rest.

Of course, it doesn't stop there. Suddenly, since you have this time and you need to garner experience you volunteer for a magazine. Which is fine because theoretically all you have to do is manage a few people...easy right?

Wrong.

One person can't do their spread, then another, then the publisher needs help and because I seem to be physically incapable of saying the word..you know, no...I get wrapped up into helping with a second magazine to do three spreads there. YAY, experience!

But of course it doesn't stop there, I get asked to help with doing web portfolios. A simple activity really, only five pages with a site builder (which SUCKS for HTML/CSS addicts like myself). Three websites where I do all the work plus one which is a basic plug and play idea and the fifth being a simple "Well if you did this." Yay, great experience. All I learned was that some people are jerks, others just don't care and more are just meddlers. Oh and site builders suck!

Then, just to put icing on the cake, no writing either!

Now, I like being highly creative. Honestly I do. It's fun, interesting and challenging...sometimes. But hell, you can't have everything can you?

So for the last month and a half I've had my head stuck in either InDesign (which I can't stand for longer than a few hours) and a stupid freaking site builder! Which royally sucked because not only was I busy in those programs, but several things got shoved to the wayside.

Probably the worst and the one that causes the most guilt was that I was unable to spend as much time with my son as I like to do. For his part he was a trooper. He played by himself, bothered me rarely and only for the necessary problems like food, drink, diaper, potty training...you get the idea. My daughter was less understanding sometimes and other times more so. It was a fluctuating pattern. Out of the whole family I think the ones that were the most understanding was my husband, our dog and our cat who fortunately didn't try to walk across my computer screen (bloody cats think they own everything).

The other horrible thing was that my bloody shoulder decided to be a literal pain. The biggest problem is that this time I could avoid the offending computer for three days straight. I had a deadline after all. So the advice I got instead....reorganize your desk! Yeah right.

But my husband, being who he is, insisted that it would be for the best and to be honest I had been thinking about doing so even before the shoulder pain that registers a 9.7 on the pain scale (I'm not kidding. When it flares up I'm almost completely incapacitated which makes doing any of the above IMPOSSIBLE...actually it makes doing anything impossible. Sad day when you can't even pick up your kids).

The other side effects? Well cleaning, I didn't do it. So my house is this clutter pile of things I won't get into. I look at it, I feel guilty but back to work I went because it HAD to be done. Then, just to put some icing on the cake, my shoulder pain makes it hard to do any cleaning. Picture this: Loading the damn dishwasher. A simple operation. Scrape off dishes, put them in the dishwasher, turn it on, go do something else. You wouldn't think it would stress out muscles, but guess what! It DOES. I swear, there are times when I think I hear someone snickering at me when all this pops up.

It's over now though...the magazines and workshop that is. So I had this big huge plan of what I was going to do. I was going to rest, write, work on that web site that I had been asked for prior to the magazine fiasco. It ended last week and due to my shoulder, cleaning has been all catch up in short bursts, writing has happened once. I think I skimmed one spiritual book, I'm trying to read one book about marketing myself as a Web Designer...which is a different story...a few magazines to keep me up to date on tricks, tips and new stuff for the CS5 version of the programs. The only real thing I've been able to do is catch up on my time with the kids. Which is good, don't get me wrong. But there is only so much you can do when you're asked to lay on the floor just so you can watch your son play with his cars (because he won't let you play with them, that's just wrong for some reason).

So needless to say, I've been really busy and it's sucked, but was also fun. This of course tells me many things about myself.

1. I'm a workaholic
2. Multi-tasking is great but not at the expense of the other important things
3. I'm incapable of stopping myself
4. I'm a workaholic

That's pretty much it.