Stressors

[shannon_a]

After a couple of good months, stressors are unfortunately increasing.

Work. Stress at work hit a fever pitch a couple of weeks ago, between over a month of constant last-minute work on Infinite Canvas and an increasing amount of stuff being thrown on my schedule. I think we have all this figured out, and I have a much better schedule for fall than I was considering, but this was what really got the ball rolling.

Builders. We are 7/8th of the way through our main bathroom reconstruction. In the meantime we've been using our secondary bathroom, upstairs. I'd expected showering there to be a real trial, because it's smaller, it takes the water longer to heat up, and it's the cat box bathroom. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the pores in the wood open up when you shower there and thus you smell pine (I think) rather than catbox. The water pressure and heat and everything else have been good too.

Unfortunately, other things stressed me out more, starting with the constant noise of construction. There have also been a stream of problems of different levels and Kimberly has been even more stressed about it all, which has also added to my own.

On the good side, the existing problems are almost all fixed, and the builders are gone until they come back to do their final day of work (Monday?) after everything has dried.

Munchkin. I've been increasingly worried about Munchkin for the last week or two, as she seems to be eating less and lazing about more. I wondered if it was just other stress that was making me stress about this for no reason, but was happy we had our regular vet tech appointment scheduled for yesterday to test her current kidney functionality and such. Bad news: despite our every-other night subcutaneous fluids, her kidney function has declined very notably. We've got a list of things we can do to help, some of which are doable and some of which are probably too costly. Kimberly and I will have to talk about it later today. (Just got the call a couple of minutes ago with the test results.)

Other Work. I always do lots of work in my free time too, just stuff that's more personally meaningful than my work work. A bit more than a month ago, I added a major new project, which is the second edition of Designers & Dragons. That's unfortunately pushed me over the top to too much work, since I also have: the continued work on my new Mechanics & Meeples blog; my regular board game reviews;  the Armorica iOS game which I've been working on forever; my regular Pathfinder game; and whatever else I"m not thinking of at the moment. I've cut back on everything and even stopped work on some stuff (like the continued cull of games from my house), but I'm still juggling too much stuff. Trying to figure out how to resolve that better.

So, lots of stressors.