We’ve had a pretty decent weekend, I think. Last night, we attended a surprise party for my husband’s grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary.

The girls have been pretty good, but a little bit of trouble. I’ve had to get onto the big sister I don’t even know how many times and we’ve only been up and moving for 1.5 hours. It’s going to be a long day.

The husband took off fishing again. He doesn’t know it yet, but here in a few weeks, he’s gong to owe me an entire afternoon to myself. I want to take off and do something totally fun by myself.

Once again, there’s nothing too exciting. We’re just hanging out there and and I need to do some housework.

It’s not even the middle of the week and I already feel worn out. It’s the busy time of the month at work and while I’m not really working late, the days are jammed full of busy activities.

I have a ton of chores to do. The kitchen particularly needs my help. I need to take care of the handwash only dishes.

Nothing exciting and my mind has pretty much shut off for the evening. I hope to turn in sort of early.

One of the most important aspects of fitting in where you work is how well you fit into the culture. It’s something I’ve learned recently. Until I took my current job, I’d never had this issue. I’ve always fit in reasonably well wherever I worked. Until now.

I know that in the last few years, my priorities and focus have changed. After I had my first child, I found I couldn’t care less about status symbols and material things. It’s amazing how that’s so not the case where I work. I feel left out and awkward most days.

It sort of culminated the day that someone commented that she could never swim in a pool at work because she wouldn’t want her coworkers to see her in a swimsuit. All I could think was that after a few weeks of being in that swimsuit regularly, it wouldn’t matter. The coworkers should be proud of a colleague getting into shape.

Maybe I’m too practical and not worried about appearances. I know what’s important to me, and it doesn’t seem to match what a lot of my coworkers consider important. It often makes me feel like an outsider. Oh, well, life goes on.

Things have been so up and down for me the last year. I’m unhappy with many aspects of my life. Things I want to improve, seem to get worse, and lately, I’ve just felt like I’ve reached the low point.

But I want things to get better, so I’ve been thinking about the ways I can make my life better, given my circumstances. So, I’ve come up with some things I can do to maximize my time and make my life a little better.

My schedule during the week runs pretty tight. There’s not a lot of time leftover after dinner, spending time with the kids and trying to fit in other stuff. It makes it hard to feel like I am accomplishing much. The weekends are usually a messy mixture of trying to fit in housecleaning, spending time with the kids, spending time with the husband,  and finding time for myself.

Depression was the next thing to hit me, and I’ve felt so hopeless about my situation. I barely spend any time with my kids, my relationship with my husband has gone down the drain. My job sucks and I’m miserable there.  It all just piled up and I’ve been feeling awful.

But I’m tired of feeling awful. So I’ve been thinking about what I could do right now to make my situation better. Mostly, a change in my attitude and perspective.

At some point I’m going to work on a schedule for household things, but a few things that I’ve been working on:

-I can’t just up and quit my job until I pay off some things and get in a better financial position. So, if I get very tight with the finances, I can make this happen. Now, I constantly track my spending and obsess over my bank account balance.

-Exercise makes you feel good and have more energy. Since it’s hard to fit exercise time in at home, I thought perhaps I could use my lunch break to do some walking. It’s not the best, but it’s better than nothing.

-I can also use lunch time to run errands, get caught up on things like mending socks, and do other odds and ends.

At some point, I’ll begin to head in the direction I want, but there’s no point being absolutely miserable in the meantime. There will be some days where I feel down, but the thought that I am working towards a positive goes a long way to stopping the negativity.

I have a feeling I will probably be taking a break from my fiction, but I’d like to think that blogging will be therapeutic in a way, so I hope to be here more regularly.

About this time of year, I always try to come up with some blogging schedule. What posts are going to be on what days or days I will post. Then real life happens to me and I blow that schedule all to hell.

So I’m trying to figure out a way to set up a method for developing good writing habits. I want to do some money-making, experience gaining writing, but I don’t trust myself at this point to do it successfully. My crazy regular life stuff tends to keep me going until I drop. Every. Single. Day.

Like right now, for instance, the only reason it’s peaceful and quiet, allowing me to write, is because the 3 year old is staying the night at my parents’ house and the cute baby is out for the night.

So I thought of taking a two or three days a week and devoting them to writing. Any kind of writing that makes me happy. Fiction, articles, blog posts. Frankly, I don’t care so long as it becomes words on the page.

In the meantime, I’ll try to get my super busy schedule from making me a stranger to my own blogs.