Day 90--Unbelievable Amounts of Work

Today was a beast of a day between laundry, a TON of essays to grade, house keeping items, grocery shopping requirements, packing attempts, and working on house stuff.  I am going to bed far from feeling happy about how much I left on the table at the end of the day, but there is only so much that I can do in a day.

I spent too much time today working on figuring out utlities for the new house and tracking down information that our lender will need like paystubs, etc.  Of course, all of that is absolutely necessary before we move, but it feels much less tangible than some of the things that I did not get done.

All of that is to say, that while I was doing a good job early in the day of being a loving wife, by the end of the day, the backsliding was extremely obvious.  I spent about half an hour outside with Barney playing various forms of catch with him, which he always loves.  But, towards the end of that time, it really started to hit me how much work I still had to do, so I quickly shut down the game and headed inside to take care of the work I needed to get done.  The more I started to do, the more panicked I felt at the inevitability that much would be still be undone by the time I gave in and went to bed.  I quickly became cranky, irritable, and easily set off, and much of that was aimed at Barney.  Even though none of my frustration was directly his fault or directly related to anything he did, he was the only moving target and thus was the recepient of the frustration.

I don't admit this lightly or feel any pride about how tonight went.  Even as I was in the midst of taking out my frustration on him, I wished that I was not but could not seem to stop.  These are exactly the situations that I am trying to avoid, and I clearly need to be extra vigilant with all of the pressure we are under right now and need to come up with better strategies for avoiding this type of behavior.  I have to go take a bath now, and I am going to spend that time working on a plan for coming up with ways that I can deliberately show affection to Barney this week that are as unrelated to moving as possible.  I think that the time has come to try to introduce some other topic back into our relationship, even if it is only in very small ways.