Suprizing Win for the Day

This morning I woke up late, which isn't surprising at all when you consider I didn't get to bed until 3 and the toddler person kept making demands every few hours so no real rem-sleep it seems, excluding a really awful dream in which a high-school acquaintance turned out to be a child rapist. Unlikely in real life, but really off-putting.

So I wake up at 10 when I should have been up at 9 to skype my mom. Then I realize I have 2 messages from my mom, asking to meet even earlier, which apparently didn't get sent to me until half an hour after the suggested meeting time. I get up and turn on my computer to realize she left the Starbucks 10 minutes previous.

Well crap.

This isn't the first time it has happened, and playing time-zone bingo is hectic pretty often, but this avoidable screw up always leads me into a dark place where nothing in my mind wants to accept that I am a person and not a waste of space. So I feel like utter crap for a few minutes, but today was a good day for my brain chemistry apparently because part of me rebounded pretty quickly, reminding me or projects I could totally finish and feel better and hey, isn't there some more Star Trek: Voyager on Netflix? And we could fold all the laundry, wash another load, and get stuff done before Julia wakes up, which means she won't have a chance to, say, impale herself on my sewing needle or unfold a half-an-hour's work in the blink of an eye.

Yeah, we could do stuff.

And I did. I don't know why I got plural like that but it makes me a little nervous sometimes, like maybe my brain will one day go through with this "us" idea and create alternative personalities to share the body and utterly confuse everything in my life.

But I digress. The point was that I managed to take the detour from Depression-land and wind up in Sock-Monkey Village, which sounds like a place that should exist to me.  I then got us up and ready to go to the post office, send off a few long-awaited boxes and all the New Year's Cards that I personally had to write.

That's a Japanese custom, by the way. Christmas isn't such a thing because most people are Shinto/Buddhist and don't really do the Jesus thing so much, so instead of Christmas cards, people send out New Year's Cards, usually celebrating the animal of the zodiac for the coming year (2016 is the year of the Monkey!) while also containing a personal message about what the person/the family did during the year and/or best wishes toward whoever is meant to receive it. Kind like a family newsletter thing, only you need a pic to go with it and everyone does it. Also, you have to have a physical address for everyone. Somehow emailing just never caught on for this, but the cards you send are literally the size of postcards, so it's not too tricky.

 I consider it my job in this household to make sure the cards get made and ready to send, which is great except I don't even know the addresses for my husband's contacts nor how to write them in Japanese. Kinda lame.

One day, I will have the kanji power!

Until then, though, I have to just try every year to get a good picture of Julia being adorable near the next year's emblem. This year, I had a sock-monkey hat ready to go, so at least that worked out well.

Relevant pics will appear on twitter. :)