Unsettled

This is never a good feeling for me. It's hard. I am a "a place for everything, and everything in its place" kind of girl.

Tomorrow we are having the ducts cleaned. The house was built in 1952. I know they have never been cleaned before, and I look forward to less dust showing up on my espresso-colored bookshelves after it's over.

After.

But first, I have to get through it. We (mostly Rob) moved a few pieces of furniture around tonight to make sure the people could get to the vents and intakes. It's not too bad in the living and dining rooms, the kitchen and the main floor bath. Our bedroom looks just like it did earlier today -- no problem there.

But the scrap room. Oh my. I have 2 tables joined like an "L" in the corner where the heat vent is. I had to pull stuff out from under those tables. Yuck. And then there is the upstairs. Yep, the boys' room and playroom. And once again the tiny pieces of Lego, the garbage, the dirty socks, are overwhelming.

The piece de resistance? A shoulder bag cooler in which Garrett transported food for the cooking class he finished a month ago. (Yes, you see where this is going, don't you?) Except I didn't see it. "It" being a bag that once held frozen broccoli that now held a putrid green liquid that smelled like death or worse. I made Garrett clean it out (complete with gagging sounds) and discovered that the inside of the bag was stained that nasty green so that we ended up throwing out the cooler. Yuck.

So my house is in disarray.

And my husband, who had this and ONLY this weekend off from school this month, is on an unscheduled conference with some of his team. I KNOW he has to get stuff done, but this was supposed to be my last night of him NOT having to be dialed in somewhere.

This week, his mom is in town, Garrett and Evan have after school activities, I have evening meetings, it appears there will be a desperately sad infant memorial service at church and I am the Caring Coordinator, it's Book Fair Week and of course they called and asked if I could do that, and Rob has class Friday and Saturday. And somewhere in there we have to find the time to clean the boys' room (because now that it's torn apart we might as well do the big spring vacuum/clean out/dust), put the rest of the house back together, spend some time with his family, do laundry, and find a moment or two to be still and be a family before it all goes crazy again and one of us is half a world away.

I am caught in a tornado. Spinning and spinning, wildly looking for something, anything, that will slow me down, let me get a foothold, give me a place to rest. I know it's temporary, but I feel terribly out of control right now, and I don't like that feeling at all. It will end, it will slow down, it will all be over a month from now.

But that feels like such a very long time.