It has been an interesting day on the prairie today. I woke up to rain falling this morning which is a wonderful thing. We are very dry and every drop of rain is welcomed and needed. It made for a cloudy, wet, cold morning though. The sun came out this afternoon and brightened the day.
I worked on taking tax tests all day. I failed the first test and then failed the second test. You only get two tries and then you have to do new problems and test again. It took for a couple of hours to do the first set of problems. I didn’t have it in me to work another set of problems. I sent an email to the coordinator and told her I am going to back out of doing taxes this year.
I have found that since the end of September, when things started falling apart for me, my patience level is mighty low. I am still refilling myself and running a bit low on tolerance and patience. I know I could have plowed through and made this work but I am big into self-care right now and pushing through didn’t feel like how I wanted to treat myself. I decided to treat myself gently and offer myself some grace and back out of doing taxes this year. I need more down time to recover. I am actively attempting to remove stress from my life right now and doing taxes was adding stress.
I was looking forward to having something on my calendar for the next couple of months but I’m sure I will find something else to do that is less stressful. Maybe I will just sit in the empty space and continue to refill myself. Going to training class on Tuesday exhausted me. I’m spending so much time home alone that when I am around more than one or two people I get drained quickly. I need to ease myself back into the land of the living.
I did 50 minutes on the bike today. I worked up a sweat and had to take my sweaters off. It felt good to go for the whole 50 minutes though. My legs were a bit wobbly when I walked up the stairs afterwards but that is a good thing. That means I am working them hard. I’ll add 5 more minutes tomorrow and again on Friday. Wow! I will be doing an hour on the bike. I can’t believe I am back up to that. I started at 6 minutes a couple weeks ago. Progress!
Still need to get downstairs and do some painting. I’m tired this afternoon so painting may wait until tomorrow. There is no rush to get that project done and the painting is harder than just painting a wall. I don’t like to do things like that when I am tired. I may go down and sand as that is not as detailed. I may just sit and do nothing but read a book. My brain is a bit fried from working and failing on the taxes today.
Yesterday I wrote that I doubted that I talked to anyone the rest of the day. I had two great phone calls last night – one from my son and the other from one of my Aunts. It was good to talk to both of them. Today my daughter Nicole called. I have on my daily checklist to talk to someone each day. Some days I can initiate a call and some days I just don’t have it in me to do so. Grateful that others call me so I can cross off that task from my list. I am aware that it isn’t mentally healthy for me to go several days without talking to someone. Doing my best to not let that happen with the reminder on my checklist to reach out if no one has called me. Most days I am able to find someone to talk to but somedays that seems like too big of a mountain to climb.
I feel like I have been in a bit of a fog most of the day. I discovered I took my morning pills twice today as I forgot what day of the week it was. I don’t seem to have much of a short-term memory today. Some days are like that I guess. This has happened before so I’m not worried something is wrong. I was worked up about the stress of taking the tax tests and frustrated with the whole process. My brain bandwidth seems to have shrunk a bit lately and can’t handle stress right now. I think it is a good thing I backed out. I need more quiet, recovery time.
Grateful I was able to back out of doing taxes, grateful for the phone calls I received yesterday and today, and grateful for the rain that fell on the prairie today.