I sat here for almost five minutes, staring blankly at my screen and wondering what to write about. Part of it comes from being so tired. Breanna’s sleep hasn’t improved much the last few days so I’m still on the zombie side of things. Hopefully tonight will be a good night; if not, I refuse to get out of bed until at least 9 am on Saturday.

Part of it is because being tired made it hard to work today. Randi mentioned how hard it is to work when you’re a writer and you’re tired, and I told her that not everyone gets that. Sure, I get to do all this stuff that I love (and I do indeed love it!) and on top of that I get to do it from home. I get to be with my kids, and that can be a juggling act and a half, but it works and I like it.

That being said, it’s not always easy. Trying to come up with something to write about every day is hard. I have the bonus of writing about celebrities who usually have something going on in their lives, but when there’s no news I still have to work. I love writing because it’s this great creative outlet, but when I’m especially tired, being creative can be difficult to achieve.

When I worked in tech support or answering phones, being tired sucked too, but at least I could usually go into auto-pilot mode. When most of the tech support calls are about the same problem with the same five or six possible solutions you can just breeze through it without thinking about it (that’s how I originally learned web design – I got so bored on the phone I had to teach myself something and I would design entire sites while helping someone configure their email or figure out what was wrong with their modem).

You can’t auto-pilot your writing. Well, I can HERE, but when I’m writing for a blog network that pays me to do a good job, auto-pilot doesn’t cut it.

Luckily I managed to find the stories I needed easily today (having two separate celebrities with birthdays today helped a lot!) and I was able to dig down into that tiny reserve we all have somewhere and I got it done. It’s a lot more fun when it just flows out, but I guess it can’t be like that every day.

Mostly I’m just happy at times like this that I’m not a surgeon. Imagine someone really tired working on the last half of a double shift and being responsible for fixing your heart or your brain while you’re knocked out? Yeah, no thanks!

*******
Tomorrow is Hayley’s last day of this year. She had a concert today – no parents, just the classes performing for each other – and tomorrow she has a class party. She’s taking in cookies and can’t wait. We also assembled her gifts for her teachers. She has two teachers that she sees daily plus two teacher’s aides. There are other teachers as well (health class, computers, gym, etc) but my budget can only stretch enough for the daily people right now. We turned four little plant buckets into reindeer (tracing Hayley’s hands on construction paper for antlers, and gluing on eyes and a big red nose), then filled each one with coffee, fancy hot chocolate, a dark chocolate bar, a snowflake candle, and a candy cane.

She’s so excited to be taking in gifts and cookies and having concerts and parties… Can I be six again, just for a little while?

*******
My beer and a bag of chips are calling me. It would be rude not to respond.