Or at least, Noel will come home from the English Country Death March.
We had a gorgeous sky today, and a spectacular sunset over the houses.
I barely saw any of it.
It's been a while since I pushed myself this hard for this long. I've been working at least eight hours a day on the bedroom, in addition to school and house care and animals. Just about everything else has fallen by the wayside. One of the consequences of this is that I'm actually in a lot of pain.
Every now and then, when it's been a while since my knees acted up, I get all disdainful of my teenage self and my knee problems back then. Then I do something stupid like work non-stop for a week through twinges, then through actual pain, and I get a good solid reminder of what the pain was like back then. Only I was far more stoic than I am now.
I had intended to go to the gym tonight and sit in the hot tub there to relax for a while, but I'm just so damned sick of having the bedroom in chaos that I didn't do that and worked straight through. I would not have been able to restart work after hot-tubbing, so I got more work done, but I'm incredibly slow now, with every part of my body protesting this treatment and writing letters to the Red Cross.
I'm almost done patching the plaster. I will finish tomorrow morning. There's not so much to do now. I'm just too damned tired to do anything more, and I want to take a nice hot shower and then get into bed.
You may wonder what Rosie has been doing through all this. She's been a very good dog, despite being completely ignored and not allowed to do anything fun because that would cut into scraping time. She doesn't mind construction scenes, although she is not fond of the Shop Vac (she follows the nozzle around, biting at it when it comes too close). She spent most of today lying on the floor while I worked, picking at her toes.
It's nice having a dog who is relaxed about stuff. Sometimes she's a bit too relaxed, but for the most part, it's reassuring to know I can tear the entire house apart and disrupt her sleeping arrangements and serve her meals late and not take her on walks and barely throw the ball for her in the yard, and she will still be her usual calm, assured self. She knows it's not going to last, and that nothing bad will happen.
The only thing she doesn't know is where Noel has gone. She's been looking for him for days, and it's not funny any more. He better show up soon, or the dog is going to have some words with him. Either that, or when he does show up she will wag her tail right off.
Now I'm going to go have my hot shower, a couple ibuprofen, and six hours of sleep.
