Taking care of business

In my quest to properly distribute this year's income, I'm starting to move forward with a few projects. The kitchen design is taking forever - the kitchen designer I enlisted said it would take two weeks for some rough plans; three weeks later he admitted to me he hadn't even started. Which, according to friends, is fairly typical. Coming up on the end of the fiscal year and the holidays, during which I'd rather not have my entire house torn apart, it just doesn't seem feasible to even attempt to start a kitchen remodel this year. However, I can probably do it early next year when my income starts up again in February.

In the meantime I still need to spend that money, so today I bought a new washer/dryer to replace my 20+ year-old stacker which leaks dryer exhaust all over the house every time I use it. I'm excited to see how my life changes with a large capacity high efficiency washer and dryer. It gets delivered in a week. 

I also got an estimate started for a complete house rewiring from a highly recommended female electrician (yay women). I shudder to imagine what that's going to cost me, but it really has to happen. We're dealing with dangerous knob and tube wiring over here. She can also get me a new solar-ready panel, which is the next big project I'm looking at.

In true mom fashion, I invested in $40 worth of Halloween decor at the dollar store. Since we don't get trick-or-treaters here, it never really occurred to me to decorate. But I knew the kids would get a kick out of it (they did) so it was fun for all of us. In this instance I added in some marquis lettering from Target for a bit of a political message:

Last week I started to feel myself slipping into a bit of a depression. Feeling overwhelmed by all the changes coming up, never feeling quite rested or recovered from the event, and various other things, sent me into a bit of a tailspin. I found myself lingering in bed too long and being generally impatient and ill-tempered, with the ever-present mantra of "I'm so depressed, I don't feel good" playing over and over in my head.

At a certain point I had to just take matters into my own hands and have a conversation with myself. "You can continue with this and make your kids miserable and ruin your relationship, or you can knock it off. But, you do you, boo." I realized that as much as I preferred to wallow that I had to pull myself out of it for the sake of the people around me. I'm not saying everything is so perfect now, but the intrusive thoughts have stopped and I feel hopeful about the future, which means the veil of depression has mostly lifted due to some concerted brain rewiring on my part over a couple of days. Let's hope I can keep this up.