Reading what Corinna has written recently, I think we are in a similar state.  It's not exactly despair, but it is frustration and exhaustion and what we were taught in my college sociology class to call "role strain." 

Doing this at this time of year (not only winter but the holiday season) is blatantly insane.  And yet here we are. 

One way this manifests is stupid fights.  And this week my husband and I had a HUGE fight.  About money and time and how on earth we can pay for all the improvements for this house and Christmas and boots for Alex, etc.  Okay, really, it was more about me picking up a shift without clearing the night (it's an overnight shift) with Austin first.  But still.  It is hard to be here and be a wife and mom and work on the house while also being at Mayo and taking care of patients and earning money.  Not to mention my unfortunately human need for sleep.

But... onward we go.  And I did not kill Austin, nor did I kill the realtors who came over on Tuesday and stressed me out all over again.  See, I am a good person; I have resisted the temptation to commit murder multiple times this week!

In this spirit (of not-killing anyone), I offer some more photographs from our recent house cleaning adventures.

First, another fabulous cat picture.  We often have dishes in our sink, so Apollo doesn't see it completely clean very often.  His reaction to the amazingly spotless sink was to climb right in, stick his front left arm all the way down the drain (which does have a garbage disposal in it, causing me to have a vision of that terrible scene from Stephen King's The Dead Zone), paw at the side for a few minutes, and then curl up in it.  I guess he approved?

Next, I have to share a photograph of something I found buried in my office closet; Japanese homework.  Yes, I studied Japanese once upon a time.  In late 1997.  And no, apparently I never threw away any of my homework from that era.  I have now recycled all of it (keeping only the hard cover Japanese language textbook that I long ago shelved with my collection of language books and a "kanji a day" calendar that Austin gave me for Christmas that year).  But here is what my 1997-era Japanese handwriting looked like:

Yeah, that's right; my handwriting sucks in hiragana, katakana, and kanji as well as in the familiar English (?) alphabet we use.

Finally, my ten year old daughter, Julia, loves to sort things.  I have a huge collection of K-Cups, and sometimes I let her pull them all out and reorganize them.  I let her do that the other day, and was terrified by the number of cups of coffee I should drink before I buy more K-Cups.

True confession: I am a K-Cup hoarder as well as a book hoarder.  Sigh.