Well, it’s almost midnight the day before this post is due to go up and I’m only now writing it because I forgot, until this very moment, that I still needed to actually write something for tomorrow/today. Good thing I decided to do a little writing to end my very long, very busy, very social, and very fun day. I am exhausted and really considered just going to bed. I was certainly tired enough an hour an a half ago to consider doing it right then. Now, my kitchen is clean, my apartment is mostly clean, and I’m sitting tucked away in my closet-turned-office to do my daily writing because my siblings are bedding down for the night and I don’t want to keep them up with my light or my noise. Which, thanks to a really over-the-top day last Friday, I only have to do just over a thousand words to make my count. I’d really love to double down and insist that I only include words on my actual NaNoWriMo project, to keep the “Infrared Isolation Chapters” train rolling along, but I’m now twenty-two days into the month and I think maybe a fifth of my total word count for this month is for writing that isn’t going up on my blog. Which, on one hand, really just goes to show me how much writing I do most months. On the other hand, though, it really isn’t in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month.

I will take what I can get, though. This month has been absolutely bonkers levels of busy, since between work being hectic and the amount of stuff I wound up needing to do in order to host people for Thanksgiving (our initial plan was to go on a small getaway, but we’ve all been too exhausted and busy to do the work of planning that kind of trip), I haven’t had time for anything other than work, clean, prepare, or collapse in exhaustion just long enough to be capable of doing my job by the start of the next work week. I mean, I’d planned to have some time to rest over the last few days, but I lost three and a half hours in the middle of the day on Sunday because my vacuum stopped working and I tried to fix it rather than just get a new one. Turns out that none of the stuff I thought was wrong with it was actually the problem and even the service line I called had no idea what was going on. And sure, I could have sent it in, paid fifty bucks plus shipping, and gotten it repaired in-house, but that would have taken six to eight weeks and it had broken the instant I started vacuuming. And I NEEDED to vacuum.

So, ever since my super productive day, where I wrote almost seven thousand words in a single day, I’ve been jamming one and a half thousand words into my evenings, in the hour before bed when I’m either calming down from whatever I’ve been doing (like today’s socializing) or as I fight the urge to sleep in order to get something I value a little bit more (like last night, when I traded a bit of writing time for a bit more sleep). I mean, I got so far ahead on my super productive Friday that even my less productive days since then have managed to keep me above my “words needed per day to finish on the 30th” mark. Sure, I’m slowly losing that massive lead I earned and I might soon be in range where a single missed day will drop me below the “1667 words per day” line on the handy-dandy NaNoWriMo chart, but I’m mostly just trying to stay focused on how even this much is an absolute victory given the month I’ve had at the end of the year I’ve had. Sometimes, considering how much blogging I do, it’s a miracle I manage to keep even this going with no interruptions…

I don’t know if I’m going to get much opportunity to actually rest this week. Thanks to losing time to the vacuum debacle (not to mention the mental and emotional costs of keeping my cool and not just giving up entirely after the fourth setback), I started Monday in the negatives, got even further down thanks to needing to go grocery shopping, and then lost even more when I pushed myself to finish up as much as I could since I correctly figured I probably wouldn’t get up as early as I planned to yesterday, the day my sister and her companions arrived. So everything got done (except for one thing, but I was able to quickly take care of that while everyone waited since my car wasn’t actually that messy), but I spent today exhausted and teetering on the edge of being entirely out of it. And, like I said earlier, I had a lot of fun but I’m properly exhausted now and should probably be trying to sleep rather than sitting in my comfortable, dimly lit closet office, tapping away at my keyboard between jaw-cracking yawns and drinks of water because I really let myself get a bit too dehydrated. Not, like, dangerously dehydrated or anything, just very dry.

It’s all an uphill battle, still. I’m sure things will calm down eventually, but I’m also really not sure I buy that line anymore. While this year hasn’t been an unending series of escalations or anything, it has been an unending series of events that wind up costing me more energy, time, or money than I expect. Things just keep happening. Not always bad things, of course. Just things. Unending things. I really need just, like, an actually quiet week (which is a notable downgrade from the month I keep saying I want). Some real rest time. Just a good, old, relaxing time. Too bad I live by myself and tend to get really depressed when I don’t encounter enough other people. And too bad I’m sort of the fallback planner and doer of things in this group of people who I’m hosting for the next few days since that means I’m absolutely putting in as much effort as I can muster to make sure everyone gets to do the things they want. At least tomorrow, aside from making all the Thanksgiving food, should be fairly relaxed. Lots of hanging out and just being around my apartment. Cooking, eating, chilling. All that good stuff. I just have to make it through another busy day (today) and then I can rest a bit more.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get to do some writing somewhere in there so I’m not super far behind this weekend when my life goes back to its normal slow, sedate pace. A little hectic can be fun! I just wish I’d been in a better position, mentally and emotionally, to embrace it. And that, you know, I’d had more time to get further ahead on my NaNoWriMo writing so that I could maybe take a day or two off of writing without worrying about falling behind. All I can do is give it my best shot and, so far, that’s been enough. Hopefully that will stay true as this month winds its way to a close.