Suddenly Grumpy

There once was a gal who got grumpy.
Not even because she felt frumpy.
To hide from her flock, the room door she did lock,
Till her nerves became calm 'stead of jumpy.

It seems a bit early in the month for me to be falling into my hormonal grumpiness, but I just felt myself slipping out of my good mood sometime in the middle of the afternoon...that kind of unexplained mood change is usually indicative of the need for a rapidwrite. I haven't posted a rapidwrite on this blog yet, but they were a staple on my old blog. Basically, a rapidwrite is a chance for you to wade in my Stream Of Consciousness, totally random unrelated thoughts with no paragraph breaks. You lucky folks!

I took a nap this afternoon, straightened up the house and read When The Bough Breaks - Johnathan Kellerman's first Alex Delaware novel - it is so good it makes his last 10 or so look even worse than they are. Now they are just page after page of disjointed, flat dialogue with no interesting plot or character interaction. The same kind of thing has happened to his wife Faye's books...I don't understand why they don't just sit back and enjoy their multi-millions and stop subjecting their fans to these awful new books. It has been at least 3 weeks since Moppet 2 did any of his "schoolwork", and I want him to start back to it tomorrow. I think I need to tweak it a little, because what seemed like a lot when he first started doing it (back at the end of April) has now become much easier. It was his first foray into planned schoolwork, and he found it intimidating at first. But now it is becoming familiar to him and he is getting it done in record time. I think I will spend part of tomorrow re-thinking what I want him to be doing. I also want to spend time working on reading with Moppet 3 every day this week - I thought she would read earlier than Moppet 2 because she is a girl, and I have heard they tend to read earlier - I can't say she doesn't get it, but she is just not in a hurry to read for some reason! I want to have her doing copywork, though, when Moppet 2 does his stuff. I got these new workout DVDs - Jay Johnson's Boot Camp. It is a 9 week program, but after P90X and Chalean Extreme, I don't think I could stick to anything for that long. It has a very military feel, with a big American flag on the cover - not the kind of thing I usually go for, but I like the gym feel of it and the basic quality of the exercises. I think I am going to use the strength segments 2 days a week and use another full-body strength workout on the third day, and use the cardio segments two days a week, before I do my bum-focused barre or floorwork. I have not worked in any of my journals for a while, and while I am feeling a creative block, sometimes the best way to break through that is just to do something. So, I want to Just Do Something in my journals this week. Yesterday I was at Barnes and Noble and looked at the new issue of Art Journaling magazine, and there was a feature on Ingrid Dijkers, who makes some very interesting journal pages. One thing she does is cut the edges of her pages into different shapes - or even cuts a whole page into some weird shape. I might try that. I am feeling a bit better since I started writing - I find that even a few small things on my mind can really start to burden me if I don't open up the suitcase of my brain and unpack them all. One of my cats is sick - we brought home a new cat a few weeks ago, and she had a cold when we brought her home. That was about 2.5 weeks ago - it took about a week for the first cat to catch the cold. It seems like he is recovering from that, but he is still not himself and has thrown up a few times. I am not the hugest animal lover but I feel bad that he is unwell, and I don't know whether it is something that needs a trip to the vet (which we really can't afford) or whether he just needs a bit more time to recover. I don't feel totally unpacked yet, but I also can't see anything else in the suitcase.