I am trying to plow through a lot of work. Between gardening and running there are a lot of tasks that are time sensitive and I have to execute the plan with precision in order to manage to get the end result. We have slid out of cleaning the house again. I literally can’t enforce a clean house and get a lot of other stuff done. For the past few years we have maintained a shockingly clean house and it has come at the cost of many other activities.

I will not choose a clean house over actually completing important work I care about.

The thing about running is it doesn’t just take up the time it takes to go run. It means I have to be rigid about my sleep schedule. It means I have to be careful what I eat because I need proper fuel in the tank. I can’t eat shitty or I will hurt myself. I can’t miss sleep or I will hurt myself. If I hurt myself my ability to hit my targets will slip and I won’t reach my goals.

It is not easy for me to maintain rigid consistency. I can feel the internal fight. This is where I have found it fascinating to research PDA over the past few years. I am the only person making these demands upon myself but I can feel my anxiety spiking. I am not having an easy time with the constant need to refocus and align my attention with a narrow set of goals. It feels controlling and subjugating and it makes me want to completely zone out and go on “vacation” (when I keep the kids alive but zone out and don’t get anything done for a while).

Mostly I shift back and forth in between what pulls my attention and interest most on a given day. I suspect that my obsession with keeping the house clean over the past few years has partially been because I have been in the house all the time and I didn’t have that much else that could pull my attention harder. Now, there’s a lot.

I am going through a really intense period of cross training, too. I don’t think I have ever done this much exercise as an adult and maybe never in my life. I ride my bike a lot. Running is still early days–I haven’t had longer than 5 miles yet and most of the runs are 2-3 miles. But I run straight uphill as I get started and it feels fucking brutal. It is forcing my lungs to be very sad and learn how to control my breathing with a much higher heart rate. I’m seeing improvement in my lap swimming that I do while Shorty has class. My shoulder joints are clicking less and I can make it down the lane nearly twice as fast as I could a few weeks ago. That’s pretty cool. I am really enjoying starting yoga again. I need the overall strength building quite badly. It does so much to improve the pain in my arms and my shoulders and my back.

But it’s a lot. I feel worn to the bone. It’s using up all of my self discipline. It’s making it tougher to continue reading all of the permaculture books. Mostly because I have finished the ones that are most relevant to garden-level work and now I’m struggling my way through textbooks that focus on major installations, city, or true forest level designs. I have a very low likelihood of ever needing to design the layout for a 10+ acre piece of land. It’s hard using willpower to force myself through reading something that is never going to be fully relevant. But some of the details and the philosophy can be applied and is relevant so I really should finish them. Ugh.

I would much rather continue my binge of The West Wing, thanks. I’m already 48 episodes in. (Sure, I’m mostly watching them so I can detect defects…. right….)

I have not been keeping up with budget tracking. I am keeping up with laundry.

Holy crap. In the past 24 hours my polytunnel has had a minimum of 5C and a maximum of 32.7C. That means the soil temperature is staying way over 5C. Time to plant all these boxes! (I love a new way to get data. Yay thermometer!)

And I’m super sick, again. Last week it was an intestinal bug and this week it is a head cold. Ugh. Missing all the first Saturday stuff is annoying because it means no trip to the farmers market and we miss Kidical Mass.