The Earth's magnetic forces, sunspots, the Aurora Boring Alice, and who knows what else, have all conspired to press me into a funk.  Winter blues.  

Well, okay, that's not true.

The truth is I've become overwhelmed by the relentlessness of my daughter's disability.  It's a drag.  I'm tired of talking about it, I'm tired of dealing with it, I'm tired of having to make what seems like an infinite number of considerations and recalculations to get through a week smoothly, or at least without her falling behind, missing out, or getting slighted.

The attention required to juggle these bowling balls and chainsaws has a way of sucking the life out of anything not having to do with juggling bowling balls and chainsaws and that gets exhausting and boring.  When fun is an anachronism, when you no longer care if you retrieve the morning newspaper in your underwear, when your conversation consists mostly of sighs, well, it's time for some recuperation.

I'm just saying I'm tired.  I've been doing this for almost eleven years.  Not that there haven't been breaks.  Heck, I had one just this past December.  Two days in Palm Springs, remember?  I should get real.

So I'm making some small attitude adjustments.  Daddy needs to let go of some things and grab on to others.  Vague, yes, but hopeful.  Find some fun.  Get wild.  Recreate.  Do the Jumble, or maybe even a jigsaw puzzle.  Jenga!!!

Y'know, I've been through this enough times to know an unfortunate vortex when I see one.  A conspiracy of coincidences?  How is that possible?  A little depression has a way of bringing out the darkest ironies of every comment, every song, every fraction of the tv commercials you go flipping through at 3 in the morning.  But Daddy will weather this one too.  He may be a little down in the mouth for a few days, he might not laugh as much, and he might go around talking about himself in the third person, but he'll get over it.

It's what he does.

*****

In other thrilling news, I've added more images to the cleverly named Gallery Of Evaporation Index Page Photographs.  The new ones are in vertical format, and while most of them have appeared somewhere on these pages in the four years I've been doing this journal, a few of them have never seen the light of day.  Be the first on your block.

For those of you who have not yet seen the link to this gallery -- perhaps you are, for religious reasons, against scrolling down the index page a little -- let me urge you to go against the angels of your better nature and have a gander.  Do it for me.  Poor poor pitiful me.

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