You know you’re in a dismal mood when you start quoting that Carpenters song.

I have no really good reason to feel rotten, other than just simple overwhelmation. If it’s not a word, it should be. Also, the weather sucks and that always seems to play havock with my moods. Not to mention that I’m low on sleep, have been waking up in the dark, have a greyhound who commences yipping at 6:30am and a daughter who, since the weekend, has decided to no longer take naps.

Plus I got a letter from the Craft Council Standards Committee saying that they accepted my work, but warned me about using premade stuff as a dominant feature in my future pieces. Which wouldn’t normally bother me, as I don’t use premade stuff like that. They noted that it didn’t apply to the pieces in question, so I should be off the hook entirely, but then, why did they even mention it? In the pieces submitted there were two, count ’em, two beads on each piece. If they even thought that the beads dominated the pieces in any way, if the idea even crossed their minds enough to make it into a letter, then I’ve got to go back to the drawing board, regardless of whether the pieces passed, as I obviously failed in my attempt.

Whine, whine, whine. Sounds like me just grousing, but I found myself sitting in the kitchen crying after cleaning up yet another puddle of dog pee and a bowl of half-eaten cereal that had been tipped onto the floor. At which point a child came and informed me that she wanted to watch TV, to which I was obliged, in the spirit of good parenting to say no. Result: temper tantrum.

Why can’t I have one of those?

Why am I not allowed to scream about how time that should go to keeping the counters clean, for example, goes into picking up cheerios and wiping up dog pee. Every light I turn off to conserve energy gets turned on and left on almost as soon as I turn it off. The laundry gets washed, decreasing the dirty pile, but the pile to be folded grows and while that diminishes, the dirty pile doubles from its original size. Time that should go into vacuuming instead goes to picking up my husband’s dirty clothes from every corner of the goddamned house, or taking dishes upstairs, or putting toys back onto shelves, or trying to figure out what to do with yet another pile of disjointed and assorted junk that has landed on a flat space, namely the floor. As soon as I start to get any work done at all, some disaster hits, or Katherine wants something or I realise that something should have been done ages ago and is overdue, thereby instilling panic.

I’m going out of my mind today.