Two things I’m trying to do, over and over again. One is write more (and submit, get published, all the work involved in that) and the other is exercise every day (which involves walking and NO RAIN and working CD players for music).

Which, you know, I keep telling myself I could be awesome at if only things like life didn’t get in my way.

So every day, I crawl out of bed, because the exercise/no exercise thing wrecks havoc on my body, metabolism, and energy levels until I get into a solid routine and am not exhausted all the freaking time, then I make my way to the computer in hopes that I can manage to get all the swirling thoughts in my head out onto a page because I type faster than I could ever write, even if I could manage to deciper it afterwards, and wish I had a data port in my head so I can brain-dump and edit later, all that good stuff, except the voices in my head just won’t shut up until I let them out but people need me, need the computer, can’t tell what’s in the cupboard/fridge/closet without me listing it all off standing next to them.

So I go for a walk to clear my head, but it’s raining off and on. Or the weather is fine, it’s past being chilly enough to need an inhaler, but my CD player decides not to work again to day, the headphone cord is wonky and I can hear out of only one ear.

By then, naturally, people need to be fed and while one child is wrinkling their nose at the thought of leftovers, the other is gleefully spinning around and around and around the kitchen which is so much smaller with all these hungry people in it, and she’s yelling, “Oh BOY! LEFTOVERS!” with no sense of irony whatsoever.

But sometimes, like today, a calming, quiet force in the guise of my husband arrives to still the chaos. We can linger over lunch today, for he is working at home for the afternoon. We go for a walk, the only noise is traffic, and we wander around the garden, green and budding. Ever patient, he just knows. Through a look, a touch, a phrase.

And then I can handle the circus again.