Silver linings.

Sometimes you realize that despite life's best efforts to induce nervous breakdowns, alcoholism or hermitism, you're actually doing pretty good at keeping up and keeping on top, and that simple moment of understanding brings with it a big relief and a sort of new, resolute calm. I hit that moment this morning.

My grades for the Project Management Theory class I just finished triggered it. I got an A on every assignment, which means of course an A for my overall final grade. If I can pull off As - and high ones, at that - things are ok no matter how panicky I may feel sometimes and no matter how much I may want to just give up, crawl into a hole and just sleep the bad things away.

Despite all of the crappy things that have been brewing in my life lately, I kicked that classes ass, and it was not an easy one by any means.

• Matt hurt his shoulder pretty badly at work and just had surgery on it a month and a half ago. He may never regain his full spectrum of movement or strength in that arm, and despite surprisingly good progression with his physical therapy, he can't do a lot of things right now. This leaves me to pick up a lot of slack, which with work and school, I don't have much time to do that. I don't even have much time to tell him to hang in there, or to give him a hug when he looks most miserable.

I'm trying my best to be understanding because I've seen the surgery photos and been there at his doctor and physical therapy appointments with him to hear all about how this kind of surgery goes so I know he's dealing with some pretty amazing pain right now, but it's starting to wear on me. I feel like a horrible person for admitting it, but I'm getting kinda tired of the knee-jerk response "I feel like shit," to my question of "how are you doing?" I sort of wonder what the point of asking is, but if I don't at least ask, it might seem like I don't care, and that couldn't be further from the truth. So I keep my sighs to myself, knowing that if I were going through what he is, I'd probably be in a much worse mood than he's showing. I can handle pain very, very well for quite some time, but once I hit my limit, get out of range: even I don't want to be around me then. Matt hit his limit long ago, and is just grumpy all the time. His reaction to the situation is really actually not that bad; I think the reason I'm starting to feel sorta grumpy back is that I feel helpless about the whole thing. Aside from giving him hugs and asking that awful, stupid question everyday, there is nothing I can do to help him.

Maybe what I'm actually tired of is being so useless. He's the one who has to do the hard work of healing; I can't do it for him no matter how much I might want to switch places just for a day to give him a break. Maybe what I'm actually tired of is the silence that is all I can give back to that "I feel like shit."

• We are ridiculously understaffed at work, and it just keeps getting worse. We in the production department are continuously given more and more work to take over from people who have been transferred or let go, or who simply quit and have not been (and may very well not be) replaced. And we're not getting paid any more for it, even though we are each individually doing at least three times - if not more - the amount of work we were doing at this time last year, when we couldn't really keep up too terribly easily even then. And there is no slack, no understanding, from other departments. We are expected to be perfect machines and just keep on making things work no matter what happens, but honestly we are seriously bogged down and I have never in my life hated any job more than this one. Which is made worse simply because it's not the job I hate; it's the people and the situation. I actually really like doing what I do, we just need much, much better upper management. I'd say we need a cash injection, too, but we just purchased a weather-reader thingamagig which will read the actual weather at our little spot in Placerville and feed it into our website in real time. Because god forfuckingbid we should continue using the weather service we've used -free of charge - for years which is pretty damned accurate? I mean, it's not like every portal site on the internet (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) doesn't already have weather info. We have to have our very own report, given by a spiffy new technological device that probably cost about what the last person let go from our department made in half a year.

Can you tell I'm bitter?

• The school I go to, being an internet school with each term only five and-a-half weeks long, is very intense and requires way more work than a traditional campus school class would. This means that if I take two classes per term, I am doing school from the time I get home from work till the time I go to bed, and all day Friday and Saturday. No personal time. No time for housework or even grocery shopping, and the hair on my legs grows long (even in summer - thank god for long pants) because shaving that stuff takes time I don't have to spare. Because of this ridiculousness I have cut down to one class per term, which will have me graduating much later and is still pretty intense - enough so that dishes still pile up until I get an hour or two of free time to do them once a week if I'm lucky. (Remember that Matt can't do much right now because he's basically one-armed, functionality wise.)

• I just had an identity theft scare, which is a huge amount stress all on its own. While things are looking up with that, indicating possibly that it was nothing more than a couple of clerical errors, I won't know for sure for a while yet, so I'm still worried and feeling sort of paranoid. I'm carrying more cash with me now, so that I don't use my ATM card as much. Unfortunately I have a tendency to stick cash-back into pockets and then forget about it, then worry later because I don't have quite enough money leftover till the next payday to make me feel comfortable in the event that something happens, like the car breaks down or some such. I always end up finding the cash, but usually not till the day after I get that next paycheck and all's well again. Go figure.

• We love them , really we do, but they drive us nuts: Our two, three-month-old kittens, Goblin and Sister, wake up at around 5 a.m. in the morning. This means that we do, too, much to our grumpy, foul-mouthed dismay. When I'm not getting to bed until 11:30 p.m. or later, 5:30 a.m. is not a time when I want to be conscious. The shortened sleep hours are affecting my days, leaving me yawning no matter how much caffiene I consume. The caffiene gives me stomach aches anyway (thank you, Gastritis), but without it I'd be sleeping on my keyboard and drool and electronics just don't mix well.

• There has been construction going on along the street right below our house for the last few months now. We're situated on a cliff (about sixty or so feet high) right above Main Street, with only an empty gas station lot between the edge of that cliff and Mai Street. The road going up to our house is very steep, and one-way: going up. Despite our and our neighbors' many requests to the construction crew and its foreman to give us a simple 24-hour notice before they block off the bottom of that road - and thereby the only legal access to our homes - they have never once given us notice, even after smiling and nodding and promising they would every time we've spoken with them. They've blocked off our road seven or eight times, and not given notice even once. They work at night too, which we got used to pretty quickly until the last couple of weeks when the equipment they have been using is so incredibly loud that it wakes us up out of dead sleep despite having two loud fans going in our room to block out the noise (which usually works). One of our neighbors about a week ago, when we were all awakened at 2:30 in the morning by a horrid, loud screeling noise in the empty lot below the cliff, flipped out and started screaming at the construction crew from the top of the drive. It was the kind of half-screaming, half-weeping that just breaks your heart. He then got into his car and left for the rest of the night, probably to a hotel room to get some peace and quiet. We waited it out for the next hours or so, seething, pacing, and promising all kinds of hell for the workers once we got into contact with the city about it.

Our calls to the city to complain of the cosntruction crew's lack of respect and responsibility have not been returned. This is especially frustrating because in those calls we're not bitching about the inconvenience to us in our everyday lives (although that is aggravating to find our road blocked without prior notice) but instead we're mentioning the fact that because it's a one-way street, if it's blocked and there is some sort of emergency people could very well die while emergency crews have to fight construction traffic to get to our road only to have to go past it, get back onto the freeway to turn and go back around - still fighting construction traffic - and through town again, try to get around the very short, tree-lined, hair-pin turn at the top of the one-way street (which I have very serious doubts a fire-truck could make), and come down it the wrong way. We're not asking for official documents on city letterhead with detailed explainations of what's being done and why, just a simple, quickly scribbled out note saying "from this time till this time tomorrow, your street will be inaccessible from Main Street."

It's really amazingly simple and wouldn't take more than five minutes. But they won't do it, and if they can't be bothered with that simple little effort, why should we expect them to alert police, medical and fire crews of the blocked street so that emergency routes can be re-planned in advance just in case? That would take a lot more time, including the possibility of actual real paperwork or even being put on hold on the phone, fer gosh sakes. I'm disgusted and horrified, and will continue to attempt contacting the city manager until I am able to meet with him personally, at which point along with telling him what's been happening, I'll show him the late-night videos of construction work with equipment making god-awful nails-on-chalkboard sounds at volumes that would have the police shitting themselves to give tickets and make arrests for if it was music at a party. The foreman - who was foolish enough to give us his business card before promptly ignoring our very simple and sickeningly logical requests time and again, and whose job it is to make sure things are done properly and in accordance with legal as well as ethical standards - will no longer have a job when I'm done, if things go my way.

I've been pretty stressed lately, to put it mildly.

Somehow, despite all of this, I got all As this term. I freakin' nailed this class, and to be brutally honest, I'm damned proud of myself. When I first started the class, I was not at all sure that I'd comprehend it. Project management is not nearly as simple as making a list of things to do, and even once you get the concepts down, actually making a project plan is still very challenging because involves lots of going back and making adjustments to schedules, time frames, costs, and task dependencies not only during the initial planning, but as the project progresses as well. In spite of its complexity, I actually kinda like it (yes, yes - I'm twisted, I know). I don't know that I'll ever become a Project Manager professionally, but the experience will certainly help with any career field I choose, as well as with everyday projects around the house (and with planning the wedding, too!) So, now that my first term back is over and very successfully so, I can finally let myself relax and believe it when I tell myself it's all gonna be ok. With the construction comeing ot an end (as long as they aren't behind schedule) and Matt gaining a little bit more movement in his shoulder every day, things are looking a little bit brighter all the time.

Ya know, maybe the whole point of this post is to say, "Sorry I've been bitching a lot lately. I'm working on it."