if I think no one is reading, maybe I can write

I'm glad my blog hasn't been overtaken by bots wanting to share inappropriate content (why is that a thing?), like a garden being overtaken by weeds, even though if my blog were a real garden it would be, well, overtaken by weeds, because I haven't been attending to it. Entropy is a force in the world. But I'm trying to revisit it in this moment as maybe a valuable space for expression because I think that having an outlet for expression might be a good thing. Maybe I can do it more. I have just sort of lost this sense of feeling like my lived experience is known or valuable to anyone and I think sharing it might help. But I hope that no one actually reads what I have to share, despite publishing it on the internet, because I am afraid about what they might think of me if they read what my true lived experience feels like inside this broken brain of mine. But also I don't want to just write in some other venue because I don't know what that would look like, I haven't got any habits of writing at all, I always imagine having an audience for my writing anyway, and posting on an existing blog platform somehow seems easier.

Yesterday was the end of a very rough break from school/work for me, but I felt like it was a fresh start or new leaf or whatever, and I had some motivation to tackle a few things on my plate. I don't really like New Year's, because although I like the idea of turning over new leaves and having fresh starts and whatnot, New Year's doesn't feel like a natural time to do so. Last year at the close of 2018, I was hoping to have a fresh start, and then 2019 was just full-on continued chaos. And if I'm using the calendar as any kind of guide, then 2019 is looking to be a real mess, too. So please let's just hope that that isn't an indication of how things are going to go for the rest of the year.

Despite feeling somewhat motivated, I didn't tackle much. I started putting away Christmas-related paraphenilia, but didn't finish. I pulled out the drawers of the "art cart" containing any craft- or art-related supplies in the kids' room, but didn't get much further. I started organizing the clothes and sorting things to be put away and washed, but also stopped mid-project. In the morning after I dropped of S at school, I (accompanied by M and baby J) got distracted by trying to find a suitable cardboard box for the aforementioned Christmas junk. I'd noticed some stray Christmas items in the garage, possibly due to the fact that we moved from North Carolina mid-Christmas season about a year ago and just threw stuff in the storage locker on our way out, so I shifted around some stuff in the garage (big sheets of drywall mostly) trying to gather it up.

M mentioned that her preschool teachers wanted to celebrate her post-Christmas birthday after school reconvened, so we went to a local salvage redistribution outlet (my favorite kind of shopping!) to find treats for that.

Tim and I had planned to try to go down to Lehi to return the cabinets. Maybe at some point I'll write about the saga of our kitchen remodel, but TL;DR: we got the wrong size of wall cabinets and have to exchange them. We also need to order countertops and thought we could do so in the same region (IKEA is having a promotion). Turns out the cabinet people weren't ready for us, but we thought we'd maybe try to get the countertops anyway so as to get it scheduled sooner. We agreed I would pick Tim up on the way south so he wouldn't have to drive a vehicle overloaded with cabinets.

I feel like I'm going into unnecessary detail here. I picked up the kids, loaded up the car to go, and it wouldn't start. The battery seemed to be dead. I thought I'd try to jump start it. My first thought was to use the other vehicle in the vicinity, which is an old Ford Excursion (which belongs to Tim's dad) that happened to have a very flat tire. I drove it closer to jump the other car but then realized our set of jumper cables were in the car that Tim had with him. Then I tried this portable jump starter kit that was in the dead car. I'd tried to use it once last year before we replaced the battery, and it had kind of smoked that time, so I worried about using it. I probably shouldn't have tried it, but thought maybe if I made sure I was using it properly, it couldn't hurt. Thinking it might smoke again, but maybe ultimately work anyway, I put on some gloves and plugged it in. It did start smoking. I dropped it. Then it exploded and landed somewhere under the hood of the car. I grabbed a tool to knock it out of the car onto the ground. Then I tried to start the car anyway and it did start. I got a little ways down the street before realizing the gas pedal wasn't working. So then I parked on the side of the road a few yards from our house, and retreated. The missionaries happened to be passing and offered to help me carry home the bags that I hadn't unloaded before this ill-fated trip attempt. Tender mercy, I suppose, even though we could have made it without the missionaries. Perhaps a small lesson here is that the moment of human connection with those 19- or 20-year-old boys was helpful even if there actual service wasn't that necessary.

So, Tim has the car with the cabinets inside, another car has a flat tire, and the other car, which actually belongs to my mom, needs to be towed. We found a place that would repair the tire right before closing time--they actually ended up replacing the tire and I got an unplanned and therefore unappreciated hour of kid-free time. With a new tire, we could transfer the cabinet boxes to that vehicle. Then we could use the van to not be stranded. The stranded car was eventually towed. And I felt like I was actively dealing with all these situations, but by the end of the night, especially when the kids were crying from hunger because dealing with food is a whole problem of its own, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed and exhausted.

And today I feel behind. I've spent a lot of the day in the bed with the baby. It seems our progress in life is one step forward and two steps backward. I am trying to keep moving.