Wednesday, October 15, 2008

7 Ways I Reclaimed My Sanity During My Mental Health Days, Maybe

1. Slept until noon every day. I never let myself sleep in late on the weekends because my mind is always bombarded with things I have to get done. I said to hell with it this time though, and stayed in bed for 3 extra wonderful hours each day.

2. Took the guest bedroom from one extreme to another. As if being a 26-year-old adult with clothes covering every inch of my bedroom floor, even though I leave a laundry basket in the corner at all times wasn't embarrassing enough, I'm also a very lazy adult who, instead of putting things back where they belong, I stash it all in the unused guest bedroom until the guest bedroom is rendered useless. In my defense, most of our storage space had been taken over by my parents and I was out of ideas of where to store all of our Rubbermaid tubs, Christmas decorations, old furniture, and miscellaneous boxes, but Jon and I finally took a truck load of stuff back to them, reclaiming our domain, and clearing out most of the guest bedroom in the process. That's not to say that I was completely innocent though, because I still relieved the room of 3 bags of old junk/trash and all kinds of crap that already owned a designated spot somewhere else in the house. I began with a room that had approximately 4 square feet of standing/walking space and ended with a guest bedroom with only a dresser and a twin size captain's bed. It took a total of 4 hours not counting the time to transport my parents belongings.

3. Watched Heroes, and a lot of it. Even though Jon refuses to admit he's been trying to get me to share his Heroes enthusiasm ever since he borrowed Seasons One and Two from a friend, and even though he refused to claim victory when the show finally caught my attention while I was folding laundry on Saturday night, I don't believe him. It most certainly was his plan all along to get me helplessly addicted to yet another television series. I was caught hook, line, and sinker dead smack in the middle of Season Two. We were up until at least 2am on Saturday and Sunday finishing the borrowed disks and catching up on Season Three through Instant Netflix so we could be all set for the new episode on Monday night. Oh yeah, he won't admit it, but he is totally soaking this up.

4. Washed, dried, folded, and put away ALL of our laundry. See numbers 2 and 3. It took 2 days. Enough said.

5. Chopped firewood. Actually, I watched and cringed while my pale and delicate gamer handled a wood splitter for the first time. I kept thinking of how lumberjacks were supposed to be a turn-on like the way women swoon over the Brawny Guy in all his plaid glory. I kept thinking of how I was supposed to be thinking, yep, that's my manly man, handling an ax like he was born just for doing this, but all I could really do was watch Jon in all his Rock Band t-shirt glory as he nervously swung the ax and struggled to do more than chip off a small splinter of wood. I had visions of him missing completely and swinging the ax right into his shins, or of the ax bouncing back from the log and hitting him square in the forehead. I was convinced we would make a trip to the emergency room before it was all over. But to my surprise I was completely wrong. Jon struggled with the first few logs, but he perfected his swing and quickly found a rhythm, and before I knew it we had an entire winters worth of wood piled in the garage. My pale and delicate gamer had done me proud.

6. Went hiking. We're participating in the Metro Park Fall Hiking Spree this year. The only thing we have to do to participate is hike 8 of the 15 preselected trails between September 1 and November 30. Not only is hiking a good way to keep us moving but it's also free entertainment, and in this economy, who doesn't want free entertainment? We knocked out quite a few trails on our time off, including Furnace Run in Richfield which was absolutely beautiful doused in all the fall colors.

7. Acquired a new pet. I hate spiders with a passion, but I have a certain moral code to follow when it comes to killing them. Basically, if the spider is outside, not bothering me, I'm not allowed to touch it, but any spider (or bug for that matter) that is within the walls of my home is fair game. So when I spotted the small spider in our bedroom I was ready and willing to kill it, but this sucker was smart and kept to the ceiling where I couldn't reach it. I saw it every day for about a week, and every day it was well outside of my fatal reach. Then it caught my eye one morning while Jon and I were laying around in bed for one of the 3 extra wonderful hours and I pointed it out to him in the hopes he would do my dirty work for me, but in true Jon fashion he opted not to kill it, but to name it instead. He named it Jesus using the Spanish pronunciation of Hay-soos. I didn't see anything wrong with this at first until one night when I noticed Hay-soos had moved from his usual perch over the bookshelves and had positioned himself directly above my head. Jon followed my gaze to the ceiling and finally agreed to kill him, but then we ran into a problem, because how can you kill anything named Jesus? Hay-soos is alive and doing well.

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