RETURN of the BLACK DOG...

Here's something I haven't had to wrestle with much since the Goat entered the picture: I am having a hard time making much headway packing up my Weird Little House, because I just feel listless and it all seems pointless and I can't see how I'm ever going to get it done on time...

I am depressed [10 points if you got here ahead of me]. And aside from the knowledge that my move here, which was meant to last five years and get me moved past a couple of financial milestones, all of two years ago, is being followed by another move after less than two years, and is in all likelihood going to be followed by another move after the Goat retires--I give it two or three years.

If it's two years, again, I may just slit my wrists...

But the real reason the Black Dog is back is this: I am having one of my periodic bouts of doubt about the Goat: here I am uprooting myself, making everyone I know and work with completely crazy, and moving 150 miles to be within reach of a man who can't even bring himself to come over and keep me company while I pack the five million books I seem incapable of throwing out.

Yes, I know, he has a bad back and can't do any heavy lifting without a doctor's permission. I know that--note to self: fall for a younger man next time.

Yes, I know, he has his own projects at his own house, and his summer vacation plans made this the only time he could do any work on them. But he is also taking off on a road trip with his sports car group instead of coming to help me, and there is nothing about driving around the Lakes Region that is going to get running water into his house. [He certainly isn't going to be laying pipe from the Lakes to the Big Woods, no matter how charming it sounds.]

It's not like I am getting nothing done; I spend several hours each day getting things moved and packed and organized. But I am months behind, and I have no idea how I am going to get done: I am nearly certain that I will have to take three or four days off from packing before the move so that I can go do production work in the East's least attractive Second Tier City. So I will not only not be getting anything done at home, I will be too frantic about that to do my work properly, and then it will, as likely as not, blow up in my face when I have to go out for the final hoe-down at the end of the month.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

While I was busy feeling Sorry for Myself because the Goat was doing his thing instead of helping me do mine, my daughter up and offered to come help me pack. It's sweet, and I hope we have a really good time, but I am concerned that it will wind up being all about scheduling visits to my mother, who keeps a very close eye on her grandchildren's whereabouts, thus exacerbating and not in fact helping with the time crunch.

Well, as some wise man once said:

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

So I will try to [a] get a lot done before she gets here while not destroying my own back, which I am well on the way to doing, and [b] concentrating on what I can get done and am in fact getting done, rather than obsessing about what isn't happening.

I think I'll have my offspring help me pack up the kitchen. That will be easier than wrestling book boxes that weigh too much for little arms anyway, and will be a good sign to me that I am in fact leaving. I don't know what I'm going to do with it all, anyway: I won't even have a kitchen of my own out in the Woods. Half of the stuff in the cupboards are things I bought in my insane need to replicate the nest I had just left, and has been there, untouched, for almost two years...

Oh, well, it's a short night but a merry one, here in Nowheresville.
Hang in there; we will most assuredly hang separately if we don't.
C