Tag: Stress

The Christmas Season is Here

I don’t like Christmas. Well, that’s not entirely true. I love Christmas. I just hate all the crap that leads up to it. My step son asked me why I get so stressed out around Christmas time. I told him because, for adults, Christmas is just the most stressful time of the year. It’s just the way it is. I usually try putting off the prep work for as long as possible. This year my family was okay with that to a small degree. The house remained Christmas free until December 10th. The season, however, is now officially in full swing.

There is a tree in the living room. It’s not decorated yet, but it will be today. Probably by lunch time.

Trips to the mall have been made. Mostly to help the kids get the various gifts for the various people they need to buy gifts for. Thus far we’ve been pretty unsuccessful, but amazon.com should fix things for everyone.

Speaking of which, amazon.com has been accessed and put to good use. It’s not over yet though, far from it.

We still need to finish the shopping and decorating. Then there is wrapping and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. Then there is cooking and cleaning and probably more decorating. Then Christmas eve we have my wife’s family over to do gifts with them. Then Christmas day itself comes and all of the stressing out and preparations are over and we can just enjoy the holiday.

Then we have to clean up. Yikes!

HoHoHo!

Random Flickr Pic

The work day is ending. I’ve wrapped up what I was working on. My wife is on her way here so that we can drive together to get the kids. I am in a complete state of terror that my phone will ring before I can sign out for the weekend.

Here’s a random Flickr Pic to help keep my mind off of the phone.

It’s Niagara Falls. Sure it’s only been a few weeks since we visited, but I wouldn’t mind going back with the kids.

Untitled

Three minutes until I can punch out.
Two minutes until I can punch out.
One minute until I can punch out.

Tired

As my lunch break nears its end I sit here thinking…

That I haven’t posted today.

Yesterday was nuts.  I was crazy busy all day and didn’t have time to eat anything prior to about 8:30 at night, never mind post to this page.  Today has been crazy busy too, but not as bad.  It feels about the same though.  I’m tired.  I’m back into one of those sleeping-is-difficult stretches that I sometimes get into.

I had hoped to maybe catch up on a little sleep over the weekend, but I ended up sleeping less than normal.  This coming weekend probably won’t be much different.  Two weeks from now though… we’re on vacation.  I have to survive nine more work days (including today) before I get there.  It’s going to be rough.

We had planned to go to Quebec City on the vacation, but taking children out of the country when you have shared custody and the other custody sharer is not going too involves more paperwork than we expected and we aren’t going to have it ready in time.  That means we need to rework our plans to stay within the US.  I asked my beautiful wife if we could try to at least get ourselves to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls before the summer ends.  She thought we could pull that off.  We just need more documentation than we realized when we started thinking about Quebec, and now we really don’t have enough time.

So where should we go?  Jen mentioned Virginia last night.  Virginia Beach sounds nice.  I’ve never been there, but it’s in the South where it’s warmer and it has… ya know… a beach and stuff.  That works for me.

What other options are there?  We could always go back to New York, but we’ve done that a couple of times now.  There are always the mountains in New Hampshire or Vermont?  Those are always great, but it’s still April.  Maybe we want to chase the warmer weather this time.  I don’t know.

I would prefer to avoid Pennsylvania, other than to drive through it to get to somewhere else.  We haven’t had bad luck there, but some of their roads have annoyed me enough that I’d rather go elsewhere.  There is always upstate New York.  We haven’t gone there with the kids.  Is it too cold for Lake George?

I’m looking for ideas, folks.  Feel free to add suggestions.