This got long. TL;DR: it's been a day, and I am grumpy.

Things started off dreary. Achy, rainy cold weather dreary. Then Spouseman woke up tired & nauseous and progressed to "Avoid throwing up by lying back down to nap" soon after breakfast.

And that's been the day. Him napping, getting up briefly to game or eat then having to lie back down again, me alternating between quietly staying out of the way so he can nap & checking on him because I get anxious any time he isn't 100% healthy.

He's fine. It's a stomach bug. People get them all the time. He gets them all the time.

But can I just let him rest & recup while I do my own thing? NOPE.

Brain's gonna brain.

To prove to myself I didn't do NOTHING because I can't write when half my attention is riveted on someone else, here's the list of done-things. They all fall under the heading "puttering," meaning they look more time-consuming & impressive than they are, for the most part.

1. watered the indoor plants like I do every Monday
2. fixed metadata for my Ingram-distribution book listings
   (because I changed a series titles, & subtitles.)
3. Made a new 3d mockup of Sharp Edge's new cover.
4. Made a couple of ad graphics for Sharp Edge & Weaving In the Ends
5. Typed a social media post for my Fediverse account to let people know Amazon.com is sale-pricing Sharp Edge at 99 cents on Kindle. (I still get compensated as if it's 6.99. Why is it happening? Big shrugs.)
6. Did my #WritingWonders prompt for the day.
7. Scheduled Patreon posts.
8. wrote this post
9. drank a lot of tea
10. deleted a lot of old duplicate photos from my Photos app.

Yeah, I write good list. It looks good. But it doesn't FEEL good. None of it is what I wanted to be doing.

I spent a happy weekend spent grubbing in the dirt, planting All the Things, getting physically exhausted and happily thinking about the next story, I planned to have a whole happy day of WriterMe time holed up in my office, wrapped up in my own imagination.

Spouseman was not demanding my attention, I want to make that perfectly clear. The anxiety is a me thing. If anything, I think he'd MUCH prefer I was able to ignore him and go be happy writing while he slept.

But that's just not how things have worked since May of 2016. It'll take multiple days for me to calm down that hair-triggered "NO ONLY CAREGIVING" focus and feel safe relaxing into my own headspace again.

And I'm okay with that, because the alternative would be not having my Spouseman, and that is unbearable to consider. But being okay with something and pretending it's ALL GOOD are not the same thing.

I will not pretend I am feeling hunky dory about a day I didn't get to spend the way I wanted just to fit into society's insistence that wanting things is selfish and positive only means perky. Lucky me, I contain multitudes and can be both grateful and frustrated, appreciative and irritable AT THE SAME TIME.

It's time to close the laptop, go watch bad TV & make a frozen pizza or something. Small happies to drive off the big blahs. Let the grumpiness drain away and gather some energy for tackling tomorrow.