2016.02.21 "You must feel accomplished."

It was hard to be sure what degree of irony S was intending when she said it to me, considering how I was lying on the couch, in a sunbeam, reading a comic book.

I looked up, and before she disappeared into the kitchen pursuing her never-ending array of tasks, I called out, "Uh, you're mocking me, right?"

She called back as she plunged into the kitchen. "No! You went up the mountain for a bike ride, did our taxes, and folded all the laundry."

It felt nice to be complimented so, but it didn't feel accurate.

Yes, I did indeed haul the Devinci up to Sandy Ridge. But my out-of-shape biking muscles made the 3/4 climb to just Flow Motion, and the 3/4 pace down, feel far too hard. I haven't been riding enough. Though it was gratifying to have the bike loaded up just as the solid wall of rain finally slammed into the ridge. The conditions had been perfect, with nice tacky dirt, and if I had spent much longer on the hill it would have turned into trail-ruining soup.

Yes, I did finally e-file our taxes. It is remarkable how anxiety-provoking the exercise is every year, even though it's just a few hours of basic form-filling. It's almost funny how the return estimate fluctuates during the process of filling out the forms, but it never fails to upset me. I enter in my information first (because it auto-fills), and whoosh! we have an estimated 8 kilobucks due to us. Then I fill in S's information and shoooop! we owe about 5 kilobucks. Then bit by bit I enter in all the credits - mostly mortgage interest and property tax - and we creep back into slight positives. It's stressful, but it's always anticlimactic. It shouldn't be such a big deal.

Yes, I folded the metric fuck-tonne of laundry we have every damn week. Potty training is not kind to our laundry volumes. And why is it absolutely necessary to turn every single item inside out when removing it? <mutter mutter>

So, yeah, I was tired and a bit wrung out. But I did not, in fact, feel particularly accomplished. Just kind of temporarily caught up.