The Post That Isn't

There are those times when you’re simply overloaded. You are outputting as much as you’ve got to give and, though you still need to do more, you can’t. This is one of those times for me.

Usually, I spend all week thinking about my next blog post. I don’t go to work on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, so I use those days to pull it together. This week, I also began working on the proposal for my book, tentatively titled Came the Hunter. The book is done. I’ve started working with an agent to write the proposal he will use to shop the manuscript to publishers. We set ourselves a deadline. I had to get crackin’.

Late on Friday, my son, Dru—who leaves today for ‘Beach Week’ with twenty seven of his closest friends—let me know he needs a few things before he goes back to school after the beach. The few things filled my car, plus a shipment of desk and chair directly to school. They cost a thousand dollars and took most of yesterday to get.

As I sat down to write last night after dinner, Dru was on the couch folding his clothes. “Mom, I think the ceiling’s leaking,” he said casually while setting a pair of underwear onto the stack. If you are not a homeowner, such words don’t ring terror in your ears. Otherwise, they do. I jumped up and found the front wall of the living room streaming down with streaks of brown water. Drips came readily from the molding out onto the floor, splashing the couch, and the piano and everything in reach.

We scrambled to get the artwork down. Within five minutes, we had work lights up from the basement, a ladder and tarps from the shed, buckets of soapy water, towels…you get the picture. And so went the rest of my evening. We figured the gutters were clogged and somehow backed up. Need to call a gutter man. 

This morning, I elbowed Cecil at six, that hideous hour when, for some reason, I tend to do all my best thinking.

“Why would gutters at the roof line be leaking all the way down in the living room?” I asked. “They’re three floors up.” I ran to the guest bedroom, which sits directly on top of the living room and, sure enough, the radiator was shooting water into the air from a valve, and had been doing this all night long, since we were too stupid to check it last night. Needless to say, the mess downstairs had grown. Need to call the HVAC guy.

So, the living room wall is crying Help me. Out at my computer, notes for the Proposal pile off to the right; notes for the blog trail to the left. Dru needs to get loaded up and out the door. Somewhere in the day, I should probably wash and brush, pay bills, and head to the office to do paperwork that’s covering my desk there.

“Something’s got to go,” I said out loud, even though it was only me and the dogs. “It has to be the blog.”

And so, my sorry tale is all about why I am not writing anything this week. I miss it already, but other things are calling in louder voices. So, have a great week coming. I’ll be back with a new post next Sunday.