Zander's Inside Voice

This weekend has been a whirlwind of adventure.

I’m over 40,000 words on NaNoWriMo and my story is shaping up nicely. I will be done early and I will definitely be over 50K words. It’s always amazing when I can actually write an entire story like this. I have too many unfinished projects on my computer that I either got bored with, it’s too personal and therefore too taxing to complete, or I WILL get back to them another time. It just wasn’t their time yet.

Girl got an invitation to a birthday party on Friday. For a Saturday party. Originally my wife and I were planning to go to the movies and dinner on Saturday but we remembered on Thursday that we had a theatre show on Sunday. So movie date was moved to accommodate the birthday party.

Birthday party means birthday gift shopping, plus a card and gift bag, and naturally tissue paper because no one ever remembers to look at their tissue paper supply before they go shop for a birthday gift. So we went to Target yesterday afternoon. Who knew that Target was the only store that sells stuff? There were so many people there that I swore it was Black Friday. We ran into our contractor there, so that was fun.

Girl announces immediately upon telling me about this party that she has no idea what her friend likes to do. A few Google searches for “stuff 10 year old girls like” resulted in some decent ideas and so we settled on a gumball machine thing where you create the bottom part of the gumball machine where it rolls around and drops out. That and a blind bag fidget popper thing. Sweet.

But wait, there’s more…

We wanted to visit the crafty fair Christmas thing at the art museum on Saturday too. So we did that before Target. We walked around and there was some neat stuff. I got a monster hat that I adore. It has one eyeball and horns. I LOVE IT!

On top of that, we had these theatre tickets today for Cats. I hadn’t seen it. I wish that was still the case. I didn’t really like it even though I mostly enjoy Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work. My wife didn’t like it either. We contemplated leaving at intermission but decided we should stay to see if it got better. Or if there was some logic to it. Or maybe because we couldn’t look away from the train wreck. My brain spent a lot of time in “What the heck??” mode. Once I wrapped my mind around the fact that I was watching a concert combined with a dance show and no coherent plot or story, it was all good.

I do feel calmer today, but too much people time and running around yesterday activated too much of my PTSD neurons and I found myself fatigued today. Coming up this week is a therapy appointment and I really, really need that right now. I think I might bring the paper from the VA packet that I found upsetting to show her and talk about all of that stuff. It might be good for her to understand that my records and the exam they had me do showed all of that. I don’t talk about that stuff much at all and I know my previous therapist was surprised when I mentioned some of the things that came up in that appointment.

With that, I am going to rest up, hopefully get a great night of sleep, and tomorrow I hope to have much more energy so I can actually function. I am almost over this ridiculous cold that has been ongoing for way too long now.