Last night, we pulled up all the dropcloths, dabbed ceiling white on the spots that got speckled (damn popcorn ceilings!!!!) and put the living room furniture back in some semblance of order. Hubby hung the blinds back up. I need to go out and survey the potted plants. I fear that some of them were not terribly happy to take a vacation outdoors. I’ll bring the live ones indoors and find spots for them, clean out the pots of the recently deceased, and see what else needs attention. If I can find rugs, I’ll get them and put them down and put up pics later. Right now the living room looks kind of stark. However, it’s not covered with dusty plastic, blue tape, and newspaper, so it’s an improvement.

I have tons of laundry – some clean and ready to fold, some needing ironing, some still awaiting a trip through the washer. You’d think I never washed clothes around here.

Bits and pieces of furniture and decorative items are still scattered about in the wrong places. We have to decide what’s going to get moved back and what’s going to get moved elsewhere. Soooooo much crap! Some things I’ll freecycle. I think the oriental rugs will go in the classifieds, though. They weren’t cheap enough to give away to just anyone. The cedar chest will go. Outdoor light fixtures and some indoor lamps will go. Ugh. And now the art studio beckons. Gotta sand and prime and paint, then insulate, then cut and install moulding and paint that. . .but not today.

I have prescriptions to refill, and since I have to go to the ShopRite to fill them, I need to make up menus and shopping lists. My stomach is roiling from the morning fish oil capsule, and the last thing I want to think about is food. I’ll get on the treadmill, take a shower and get dressed, and think about it then.

Mornings are the hardest part of the day for me. I wake up, I never feel as if I’ve slept well, and my brain immediately kicks into high gear with the to-do list, and all the other wishful thoughts it can possibly cram in. At the same time, my attention span is short, so I’m both mentally and physically bopping from one thing to another. I can’t finish reading the paper. I’ll start to unload the dishwasher and then do something else. I know that when the Adderall kicks in I can breathe a sigh of relief because I’ll be able to relegate the extraneous thoughts back into storage and take a rational look around me and decide what needs to be done and in what order, and look at the chaos around me as just stuff instead of an entity intent on destroying me. It takes about an hour and a half, and it’s just kicking in now, gradually. I functioned, more or less, like this for all my life. Now that I know it can be better, though, I have a lot less tolerance for it.

Now, one thing I did manage to read today was a story about two brothers, ages 48 and 51, visiting relatives in Rutherford, NJ, from South Carolina. They were in the car together, and decided to go around the gates blocking train tracks. The engineer was going below the speed limit, had blown the horn multiple times as he approached the crossing, and the gates and warning lights were in working order. Needless to say, they’re both dead, but at least nobody on the train was injured because of their actions. So in the article about the accident, relatives are making comments about this “accident” and “why did this happen to them?” Well, gee. . .ya think? The train was close enough that the engineer saw them as they began to cross the tracks and applied the emergency brakes right away. It wasn’t an accident, it was stupidity. It didn’t “happen” to them, they did it to themselves. I have loads of sympathy for people who are accident victims, and I feel sorry for people who lose a loved one, regardless, but this is a pretty cut-and-dried case of people paying the price for doing something they should have known not to do. The article says 17 people have been killed on NJ Transit train tracks so far this year and mentions a pedestrian who was hit in Red Bank as another recent one. It doesn’t go into detail about which categories the deaths fall into, but I’d lay odds that there are only two categories – suicides, and people who drive around warning gates. Both types make me angry, because they’re completely preventable, and they leave train operators and crew with horrific images and undeserved guilt to contend with. Many of them end up leaving their jobs because of traumatic stress. Sorry, I just can’t feel bad for these two guys. They were old enough to know better. My sympathies go out to the two people operating the train.

Now the piss and vinegar is flowing! Woohoo! I’ll put on some medical show I recorded and hop on the treadmill and be able to accomplish at least a few things today. Oh, and it reminds me of one I was watching yesterday while folding laundry. Only paying half attention because I didn’t have my glasses on and couldn’t really see it, but one of the patients was a girl who went off the road in her car. The focus was on her love of dancing and how her injuries to her foot and legs might end ballet for her. Well, everything turned out OK, and some doctor or paramedic said that it would have been worse if she’d hit one of the trees head on instead of going between them. The dad, I think (again, no glasses, only half my attention) said “God must have been looking out for her and made her go between the trees.” Geez Louise. If God was watching out for her, he’d have made it so she didn’t have an accident. Yeah, God, the sadistic bastige, was watching her and decided he’d have a little fun and only nearly cripple her. Give her a little scare. C’mon, can’t you guys take a joke?

So anyway, off I go to try to make order out of chaos. I might be back later today, might not. If your weather looks as lovely as ours does, go out and enjoy it!