So Sad :(

I am quite sad right now. Well, perhaps I shouldn't be. I really should try to put things in perspective, after all. I really do live quite a blessed life. I've got a wonderful wife and two wonderful kids. I've got a nice home in a nice neighborhood, and I have a relatively stable, relatively well-paying job in this horrible economy. So, I guess I'm lucky in many ways. I've got no right to whine about my life. However, all that being said, nobody can feel happy all the time, and at the moment I feel sad.

Why?

Well, the primary reason has to do with this rapidly approaching time:

6:07 AM, Janurary 5, 2009

That's the time my alarm will go off tomorrow morning, and I'll have to start getting ready for my first day of work since December 23rd.

Yes, I guess I'm lucky to have a job to go to at all, but after 12 days off, this is really going to be a shock to my system. I've gotten used to hanging out with my kids all day. I've gotten used to lounging on the couch in a t-shirt and sweatpants at 3 in the afternoon. I've gotten used to playing with my kids new toys. :)

So, yes I'm lucky to have a good job with good pay and cool peanut butter machine, but going to work tomorrow is really going to bite. So many projects that need to be done. So many things people are leaning on me for. So many ultra-tight deadlines. I'm not going to enjoy this.

The second thing that is getting me sad is my basement. We'd eventually like to get the basement finished, but we have some water seeping through the cinder-block walls. No matter what we do to get it fixed, it's going to be quite expensive, and it's been incredible stressful to figure out the best course of action to take. But beyond all that, what is really stressing me out is what we need to do to get the basement organized. Our basement is a mess. My kids have gotten load of toys from relatives over the years, Ruth buys all sorts of stuff that we wind up storing in the basement, and lots of of my older relatives ( who have moved into small retirement-type homes ) are using our basement to store all sorts of heirlooms/junk. We've given away what we could to charity ( can't give away my relative's stuff - actually mostly my Dad's stuff ), but it really has barely made a dent in the basement mess (no pictures, BTW - the mess is too embarrassing ). We have a bunch of shelving up against most of the walls. The shelves are packed, and each shelf has about 4 feet worth of loose bags/toys/boxes/junk/etc. on the floor in front of it. We need to get waterproofing work done on the basement walls, which means that everything that is on the walls needs to come off the walls. This is not going to be easy. We have more stuff than we have shelf-space, and we have to take all the stuff off the shelves before we can move the shelves off the walls to another location. There really isn't enough room in the basement to accommodate all this stuff and the room for the waterproofing folks to work, so I'm going to have to move lots of stuff from the basement to other rooms in the house.
I spent all day working on the basement today, and I barely made a dent. I am every much exhausted. Not really physically exhausted, but mentally exhausted ( I actually ran on the treadmill after doing the basement work today in order to get a mental break ). The job is just so overwhelming that my brain is all tied up in knots.

What's also going to suck is that all this basement will definitely cut into my oh-so-fun online time. So, let me apologize in advance if the blogs/videos don't come quite as often.

Actually, I am aware that the YouTube videos haven't been coming that often for a while now. I used to do about one or two a week and I would rarely go more than 7 days without doing a video. Unfortunately, I think those days are over, even after the basement work is done. There are certain IRL reasons while I'll have to cut back on how many YT videos I do. I don't think I should going into those reasons in a public blog, but lets just say that the reasons why I'll need to cut back on YT videos makes me more sad than the fact that I'll be making less YT videos.

Well, once again, sad is a relative term here. It's not like I'm terminally ill or homeless or starving or anything like that. I'm just feeling a wee bit down - perhaps not justifyably - but I am down a bit.

However, posting a blog post always makes me happy, so I'll be a little bit happier in a few seconds.

Rich

P.S. Oh, and blog comments make me quite happy as well ( hint, hint ).