less stress more veg
Tue 2016-09-27 23:59:59 (in context)
I woke up this morning with ALL THE STRESS because tomorrow is departure day. I've been excited and happily looking forward to "Five days in New Orleans, yay!" and "Double overnight train trip, bliss!" since I made the reservation, but apparently "Oh shit I have so much to do before I leave town" didn't become emotionally real until my alarm went off today.
Thus, interlude with soothing vegetables. In theory, anyway. I am trying not to think things like "Gotta cook and puree the tomatillos in another batch of salsa verde which I will freeze before I leave" and "Wash carrots! Chop carrots! Bag up carrots for trip! Make salad-to-go! Egg salad and cucumber sandwiches! Must also get to grocery for trail mix, hard cheese and beef jerky!" and also "I'm going to be gone nine days, I have to boil down all the leafy greens now!" No. Hush. Soothing vegetables. Vegetables with a respectable shelf life. It'll be fine. Ssh.
I've been stressing and snappish and despairing and panicky by turns. It's been icky. Finally, on the drive over to roller derby practice, I realized that by 9:30 I'd be even more panicky and also exhausted from practice, and that discretion was the better part of valor, and that it might be kinder to myself to skip practice in order to Get Pre-Travel Stuff Done. So I dropped John off, packed up my gear (I'd left it at the practice space rather than shlep it home Sunday), and turned right around for home. And, damn, I Got Stuff Done! I'm in a much happier place now.
Still, some things remain necessary to do before I go:
- Type up the September Fictionette Artifacts to mail from New Orleans
- Put my outdoor wheels on my skates
- Do all the laundry
- Pack all the things
- Call the car rental place to reserve a car and also pick-up service at New Orleans Union Station
- Scrapbook all the browser tabs I have open that contain short fiction I want to read on the train
- Download podcasts
- Do the usual volunteer reading for Wednesday
- Visit the grocery store to finish provisioning my snack/meals-on-train bag
This is not an impossible list, thankfully. Especially since I'm not exhausted from derby. Also, one of the tasks I'd accomplished this evening was something I'd been Procrastinating Through Dread, and it is scientifically proven that accomplishing such a task frees up three times as much energy as the task itself requires. So I'm actually feeling pretty chipper now. My get-up-and-go has arrived with a can-do attitude in tow.
Meanwhile the list of things I need to do but which can wait until I am actually on the train, or at least until I'm at Denver Union Station, is much shorter:
- Finish preparing the Friday Fictionette that was for September 23
- Other daily writing tasks
- Giving some long-overdue attention to the short fiction revision queue
In other words, I finally get to write. Yay for trains!