Headlines are hard

That lovely feeling of accomplishment has faded. Funny how the next round of must-do tasks wipes that out fairly quickly.

And, despite the fact that at 7 a.m. today and 7 a.m. tomorrow I had / will have a beastly headache from staying up so much, here I am once again, one hour and 52 minutes after I declared I was going to bed. Blame the Johnny Cash feature on PBS, blame computers and the fact that laptops mean that work is portable into the once-sacred hearth zone.

School starts again in 13 days. I don't know where that is going to fit, financially or temporally. What's more important, forging ahead with some made up "plan," or a rational evaluation of actual capacity? What is my capacity? Is this pace healthy in any way? I haven't felt sick in a while. Maybe I'm over it.

I cut the grass last night. Finally. I'm sure the south neighbor will do hers again tomorrow, even though she did it Sunday night. She has a regular gas-powered mower, and we don't. That means she was violating air quality karma (and being noisy when it's relaxation non-work time) and that my dusk-to-dark clipping and ripping was not. She strikes me as competitive about the lawns' height. I could care less — ours was barely up anyway, since it's not stupid zoysia grass like her yard and our back yard. Thick and stupid and aggressive trailing viney grass like that makes me mad. I mowed a path in the back yard and quit.

I feel bad about cutting our grass when the north neighbors' is high. I feel like I'm making them feel badly, when in fact, like I said, I don't care about grass height. The legal limit is 10 inches anyway. The north-north neighbor came out this evening and cut both of those lawns. Hmm. I hope everyone is all right. Aforementioned south neighbor's roommate / partner / friend went off in an ambulance the other Sunday. I noticed that she was back, and she seems o.k. They are not walking the dogs, presumably because it's too hot, so I haven't seen them in person to ask. And anyway, does one ask about that kind of thing? Concern versus privacy.