So close I can taste it

Freedom is just around the corner. Three of the five big boogeymen are out of the way (Maddie and the traffic ticket and the pile of rot in the garden). Now I just need my truck canopy on and Lou to be out of my sister's driveway. The details will fill in... November will be glorious!!

Hell Week: ThursdayMorning

Okay. So, chippin' along. I am so excited for this week to be over!!! I mean, Friday night is all I want. But, I have accomplished a bit off my list:

• Printed up everything I needed to file a suit against this gal with my horse and was going to fill it out today. She emailed me back though when I checked my email this morning. So, finally some communication there. Looks like she wants to sell the horse but just having some sort of idea what's going on puts my mind at rest. I still don't trust her but I would rather go this route than court.
• I bagged up all my green tomatoes. They need to sit in the basement and think about what they've done. Or not done more like. Like ripening. Hopefully I will be able to do something with them in the next couple weeks.
• Was able to check cleaning the house off the list not because I did it but because Roni got home before I thought they would so I didn't need to get it sparkly for them because she already saw it as is.
• Have not mopped the damn basement yet but took the crucial first step of buying a bucket for the mop.
  
• Gave up on washing the dogs. Although, walking into my bedroom this morning after getting coffee made me think twice about that. They are a stinky bunch.
• Also gave up on the backyard. I do want to putter around the house but I don't feel like it has to happen ASAP now that I ripped out all the vegetables.
• And, also gave up on donating clothes right now. Needs to happen but not this week.
  

So most of my accomplishments are non-accomplishments. But, as long as it means it's something I'm not worrying about that's all I want.

... Tuesday of Hell Week ...

Okay... so today I accomplished a bit. My freaky to-do list is not as marked up as one would hope (one being me, primarily) but I still have three days of outrageous productivity.

• ripped all the plants out of the garden. this was necessary. there were loads of moldy tomatoes. and one giant pumpkin. and armloads of green tomatoes, lots of green peppers and a handful of a few ripe tomatoes and one orange bell pepper. maybe a couple jalepenos and some little eggplants too.... The yard is less panic-inducing now. It is just grass, with bare beds, minus the broccoli, beets and cauliflower that are still chuggin' along. I like it.
• I mailed in my traffic ticket to get a court hearing so I can only pay for my speeding fine ($144) instead of the lack of registration and insurance ($550). Still need to drive to Chehalis in a few weeks for the hearing and will still have the speeding on my driving record (hello insurance increase!). But, that is what it is and I can't speed in my truck anyway so... here's to that not happening again.
• Threw a load of laundry in. Badly needed. Dog hair was all over my bed. No more cuddling, as cute as they are. 160lbs of dogs is too much for a full-sized bed. That's 300lbs of creatures on an old mattress. Now I just need to chip away at all the unfolded laundry on my floor...
• Swept the basement. Need to mop it but there is not container for water. Will get a bucket later this week and that should take just a few minutes to finish. REALLY DIRTY. Like, pounds of dirt from those creatures.
• Ordered my lifting shoes for my cert next weekend. I coughed it up and spent $30 more to get the ones I really wanted. Super excited for them to show up!!
  
• Started a pile of clothes to donate. This has been a long time coming. I wear about 4% of what I own. And I wear that to death. The rest just hangs there or piles up on the floor. And then I wash it because it laid there long enough to get dirty. And then it goes back on the floor. Awesome.

That's it so far.

Hell Week

Turns out I did a fantastic job of procrastinating this month. Too bad that is not a valuable life skill because I would be set if procrastination was the new productivity. So, I made a pact with myself. I will let this week, the last week of October, be the worst week ever if, in return, I can take the month of November off. Like, I don't want to lift a finger next month. I want to go to the Atlantic Crossing and the Kort Haus and play Buck Hunter and Rock Band and cook delicious fall food and make mulled cider and go on long walks in the rain with the dogs and stay too long in the gym trying to do handstand push-ups and muscle ups and play cribbage and watch movies and make playlists for my shuffle and visit my family without an agenda. But, in order to do that, I have a ton to do this week. It looks a little like this: clean the house really well, clean my bedroom (= folding all the clothes on the floor and washing my comforter cover that both dogs slept on), pull up all the moldy tomato/pepper/eggplant plants and clean up the yard, set a court date for my traffic ticket, get the stupid wax out of the carpet where it spilled out of some plug-in smelly thing, order lifting shoes for next weekend's lifting cert, clean up Molly's backyard, file a suit against the creep who has my horse and has yet to pay $1 for her, pay rent/utilties, remove the stereo from my old dead truck (RIP Lou!!) and donate him to public radio (gay! Seattle! liberal!), put fenders on my bike and batteries in my lights so I stop driving the 1.5 miles to work, put the canopy on my truck so the dogs aren't riding in the open bed, move the couch from Molly's, go downtown for a top secret mission. Yeah, so not too much, just the ushe. And, on top of all that, I signed up to work two extra shifts this week so I could earn vacation hours for November. And, to seal the deal, I want to not have to do any of this on Saturday so it can be a scary rugby day instead of a stress basket day. Let's see how it goes... I am a psycho.

Otis Redding, orange leaves, snotty face... must be fall.

I've got slippered feet kicked up on the coffee table, my head is swimming with too much black coffee and too little water. It's golden outside. (I just realized what my next tattoo is going to be) The sky is perfect blue, the trees are perfect brown, the leaves are on fire and the grass is green and poofy before it turns into a winter old man's combover. I'm sick, struggling with a resume and managing to not think about good answers to predictable interview questions I will undoubtably be answering Tuesday morning. I took the CPAT yesterday for Burien Fire. I was sick, tossing and turning from 3am-5am with a fever before I got up and popped a bunch of advil and slept until 6:30. I've taken the CPAT before, no problem. I guess you could see it as a test of if A) you're alive and B) have muscles somewhere in your body. But, that's about it. I passed with 3 minutes to spare, my best time so far, (we're not supposed to know our times but I always sneak a look, the psycho Crossfit mentality wins every time) and I was definitely not in tip top shape. So, there's that. And I have an interview Tuesday morning. There are still 30 of us (unless someone managed to fail the CPAT, which I strongly doubt) competing for one job. But, shoot, that's a better chance than the 50 or so people that Tacoma isn't hiring or the 100 or so people Seattle isn't hiring. Not to mention the lack of phone calls/interviews from every other department I've submitted scores to in the past year. Burien is close to home, urban, and a shot at becoming a career firefighter. I'm stoked/terrified for my interview on Tuesday. But, today, I am home in Carharrts and slippers, sore from this stupid cold and the 8 minutes of activity from yesterday. If you type "Into the Mystic" into Pandora you get a pretty sweet soundtrack to write a resume to. Or register for your Level 1 Crossfit cert to. Or blog to. As it turns out. It's a pretty awesome day, even with this snot in my throat.