G'day for Wednesday.
Sharon/WO, I hope you enjoy being back in the classroom today. Good luck with getting to the club for your workout.
Rabbit, enjoy your busy day. I hope it is productive.
We've had a moderately productive day for difficult child 3 today with schoolwork. I had to nag a lot, though. We've got things lined up for schoolwork tomorrow, in fact I've got plans for the next few days since I'm going to need him to catch up.
We got an early call at the door this morning - our next door neighbour who has dementia and is also paranoid about bushfires, was once again cutting back our "overgrown trees threatening his property". He did this on Sunday afternoon also, it's driving us crazy. The stuff he's cutting is NOT on his side of the fence and actually when I looked at what he cut, he's cut about a metre below where we've been keeping it pruned to. Then he tosses the cut branches onto our side of the fence (which is the legal thing to do) but it puts potentially dead wood next to a wooden fence, a bigger fire hazard. We need to put any cut stuff through a wood-chipper as soon as possible before it dries, but husband isn't going to have time to do this for a while because of my surgery on Friday possibly also having me need him for support over the weekend too. The neighbour had been told (he did remember I've got a diagnosis of cancer) but his phobia over fire (there is no risk, folks) was just too great. The first we heard of his current insistence over our trees was on Sunday, we had trimmed it all back only a month ago, immediately after he last asked. He watched us cut it, he was happy.
I said to him today that we only cut if a month ago, and then cut more (repairing his damage) two days ago. he said, "It grows back so fast though, doesn't it?"
I told him he was making more of a fire hazard, cutting it when we now have to wait two weeks to get rid of it. It's safer on the tree than dead on the ground.
So this morning, when I really could have done without it, I had to drag the cut timber away from the fence and I need to find someone who can use the wood - he's cut low down (because he could reach it) and on our side of the fence, so the wood is as thick as my upper arm. We can't mulch that. Grrr... and we can't do a thing about him, his wife can't stop him either (she tried to).
Right now I'm trying to type this as difficult child 3 keeps coming in and talking at me about totally irrelevant stuff. It is very difficult to not end up screaming at him, but it won't achieve a darn thing if I do. It's taken me about half an hour to type this much!
I did manage to get a little rest this afternoon, then it was time to take difficult child 3 to tennis. We got back from tennis with about half an hour to spare for me to get dinner for me and difficult child 3, chase husband down to mother in law's for dinner, and get myself ready for choir practice. We had a good practice, I also warned them I might not be able to be there next week.
Tomorrow I have my new cleaner. She's actually someone who's done it before, she's not brilliant either but hopefully she will be an improvement. I haven't seen my previous cleaner around town at all, I have no idea how he's taken my request for a change. I hope he's OK, but I can't continue to feel responsible for him. The new cleaner is coming early in the morning, I'm thinking of keeping her at this really early time if I can, because it will be less disruptive for difficult child 3 (one reason I asked for the change). My previous bloke would often turn up late, he had asked me to accept a later start time and I'm almost certain (no, I AM certain) that a large component of this was his depression and the difficulty he had in getting out of bed in the mornings. I was increasingly feeling like I had to do his thinking for him and try to second-guess what he was going to do. Or he would turn up and be "off the planet" and doing stupid things (like his infamous use of the vacuum cleaner as a portable black hole). Oh well, we'll see how it all goes tomorrow.
Today was a cooler day, it had a definite autumn feel to it at times. I've had a light cardigan on most of the day.
More brochures, booklets & info have been arriving, all on cancer. I'm blown away by the avalanche of material. I've been trying to get through it all before Friday but I think I've just about reached my limit. One brochure today I found very depressing, it was a "how to talk to your children" type of book, and it brought back a lot of my own fears when I was a child, about my mother's chronic health and how we weren't told anything.
One useful thing - they sent me a CD of relaxation exercises which I just loaded onto the iPod. I'm planning to have the iPod with me on Friday, husband can take custody of it when I go to surgery. I'll be glad when this bit is over.
Enjoy your Wednesday.
Marg
