Rejoice, my people. Painting is done. I repeat the bathroom is painted. Now I just need to rehang the mirror and switch plates. And finish scrubbing the mural off the wall. The end is in sight and rejoicing is appropriate.

I got my walk in this morning. It’s a little weird when it doesn’t happen. Tomorrow is another day when I gave away that hour for some reason. Well, because I had to. It was the only time it would work to meet the carpet cleaners. I think I’m going to try to get up extra early and go when I normally supervise the boys getting ready for school. Maybe Dave can handle that. Or they can handle themselves.

I’m finding myself missing the books. Although I don’t think I can handle anything too heavy. I wonder how much like a real job this past week has felt. Doing things you don’t really feel like doing, but getting paid well for it. Is that the trade off everyone makes? Give up the things you want to be doing for money?

I haven’t made any progress on any of my goals. It’s actually depressing. I probably could have – there are adjustments I could make if this was going to be the new norm. I’d have to move it to the afternoon instead of allowing my current check out of most things except the kids mode. I’m not sure that really counts – it’s not like I’m hyper available parenting or anything. I just let myself do nothing for those couple hours. 2 or 3 hours of nothingness….aka netflix…that could definitely go toward goals.

There’s a lot of dissatisfaction that happens on your way toward things. It’d be nice if it was all destination. That’s always the synopsis – the summary you get when people tell you their story. That’s the only way to put the huge amount of time it took into the 90 second story I suppose.  In real life, there’s lots of wanting, aspiring, trying, taking breaks, giving up, starting, trying, taking breaks, being dissatisfied, trying something else…and then you look back and all you see is that it’s done. You don’t really remember the frustration so much or the starts and stops…you just see that it’s done.

I guess that’s why people do hard things. Like having a baby, raising a kid, getting a degree, writing a book….there’s got to be a certain amount of amnesia one experiences to do any of these things more than once. There’s just too much ridiculous hardness involved to remember it *all* and then sign up again.

I wonder why it is that we remember the highlights…especially when in the moment all we can dwell on are negatives. You’ve noticed that right? You do something and two or three people comment with how much they enjoyed it, how great it was and you think “Awesome! Although they were probably just saying that to be nice.” Someone else tosses out a comment that wasn’t so complimentary and we obsess over it. We forget the nice comments (we’ve already dismissed them, anyway) and can only think about this one contrarian.

Why is it in the moment we focus so much on the negative if when we’re thinking about the past we tend to gloss over the negative and think only of the positive? What kind of psychological sense does that make?

Seriously, I’m wondering. What are your thoughts?