Weekly Goals, Week 51: Grieving

I'm not expecting too much of myself right now.  Izzy passed away Wednesday morning last week, so I took the rest of the week to grieve and recover.  As a result, I didn't accomplish all of my goals for the week.

It's easier now, but I still don't feel back to normal.  My motivation is completely shot.

We've done a few things we hadn't been able to in the last couple of months while we were taking care of Izzy, like going to a movie, or having a drink in the evening.  (We didn't dare drink much while we were taking care of Izzy because we had to feed her late at night, and we couldn't afford to be tipsy while feeding her.)  It's been nice, but also sad, because I never wanted those things enough that I would have chosen to lose her.

The one thing I have been more or less successful at is writing nearly every day.  In some ways it's become my retreat from reality.

I'm going to still go easy on myself, but I'm also going to try to start getting back into a schedule again.

1. Write every day
2. Get caught up on cleaning

I don't think I'm going to try to accomplish more than that.  I think that's enough.

In Memory of Izzy

My cat Izzy, whom I've been taking care of for the last couple months, died suddenly and unexpectedly yesterday morning.  She'd been at the vet the previous afternoon, where we found her kidney values had remained fairly stable since her last visit three weeks previous.  The vet was having us change up some medications to help keep her more comfortable, and overall, she seemed to be doing better than she had over the weekend.  She was fine yesterday morning a little after 6am after I gave her fluids, and at 8:30am Zac found her gasping for breath.  He woke me up and I made it in time for her to die in my lap.

I don't think I'll be very productive for the rest of the week.

Next week I'm going to try to return to my old schedule and try to get some things done.  After I deleted all of Izzy's feedings, fluids, and other meds reminders from my calendar, I realized how much time I spent taking care of her.  I'll have a lot more time now, not to mention a lot more sleep.

Not that I ever second guessed giving up all of that to take care of her.

Izzy was such an integral part of our lives, it's hard to imagine what life will be like without her in it.  I brought her home just over 12 years ago; she'd been dumped at the barn with another littermate.  After her sibling was stepped on by a horse and had to be put to sleep (I took him to the vet to see if he could be saved), I decided I was not going to watch another kitten die.  I trapped Izzy and took her home.

She was a feisty little thing from the very beginning.  I don't know if it was "tortitude" (she was a tortie tabby), or the fact that she'd spent three formative weeks of her kittenhood at the barn, but she was a troublemaker.  She broke a lot of things that I cared about, chased my old lady kitty, and attacked our feet under the bedsheets until she was a good four years old.  She also absolutely adored our other young cat, Ivan, who was three when we brought her home.  I nearly lost them both when I separated from my husband in 2014, but ultimately he decided he didn't want the cats (I think he'd been using them to try to make me come back), and I got them back in late 2015, a year and a half after I'd left.

It will always make me sad that Ivan never came around to Izzy after she came back from the hospital.  He'd always hissed at her when she came back from the vet, and it would take him days to be willing to snuggle again.  She loved him all of her life, and would often sleep with him or go to him for snuggles and grooming, and I know she wanted that so much when she came back from the hospital.  The closest they got was about a month ago, when he let her sleep on the couch near him for a little while (she kept inching closer, and was right next to him by the time he got fed up and left), and about a week before she died, when he looked in the bathroom at her (he might have been wanting to steal her food, but it was the closest he'd come to her without hissing in a long time).

I'm glad though that we were able to be with her when she died.  She took her last breath in my lap.  I am grateful that she died knowing she was home and we were there.

I'm going to take the rest of the week easy.  There will be plenty of time to get back to a schedule next week.

Weekly Goals, Week 50: The Cost of Caregiving

Last week definitely didn't go as I thought it would.  I was hoping to catch up on housecleaning and get back to work on organization projects and doll projects, but instead we ended up just doing the bare minimum of things to survive.  Izzy also took a turn for the worse later in the week, ramping up our stress as well as the amount of time we spent caring for her.

Today I've been thinking a lot about the cost of caregiving.  It claims a substantial chunk of your time to take care of an animal (or person), and the result ends up feeling like you're simply transferring some of your energy and health to them.  It's exhausting, physically and emotionally, to take care of them, plus the stress itself is exhausting as well.

Take today, for example.  I'm squeezing this blog post in between giving Izzy fluids and feeding her again.  Everything has been taking so long that there has been less time between Izzy-things to address me-things.

Somehow, in all of that, I've managed to work on my new novel almost every day.  I'm still in the planning stage but I think I'm about ready to start writing.  I'm not a big planner, so I'm just sketching out the basics such as main plot points and character information, and the rest will get filled in as I write.  This is more of the way I usually do things, unlike Amnesia, which I started with only an opening scene in mind and absolutely no idea of where I wanted to take it.

As for this week, I'm expecting poor productivity, just overall.  We have Izzy's vet appointment tomorrow, and I'm afraid we won't be getting good news, in which case I won't feel like doing much else.  I also have plans to ride Friday midday and babysit Friday evening.

I have my usual calendar mess of goals, but in general, this is what I want to accomplish this week:

1. Work on my new novel almost every day
2. Clean something
3. Organize something
4. Work on a doll

You'll notice my goals aren't super complex this week.  I don't care what I clean, as long as I do something.  I don't care what I organize, as long as I make some progress, somewhere.  I don't care how much work I do on a doll, as long as it's something.

I feel like lower standards for yourself are another thing that tends to happen when you're focusing on caregiving.

Wish me luck.  I have a feeling it's going to be a hard week.

Weekly Goals, Week 49: On to the Next Thing

It was a whirlwind ending, but NaNoWriMo FauxNoWriMo, our November novel writing challenge, is over.

I did not make it to 50,000 words in the month, but I knew I would not.  Early on in the month, in fact, I gave myself permission to fail, since I knew I would be spending a lot of my time taking care of Izzy.  My goal was to write every day, and while I didn't entirely succeed, I also was able to maintain a habit of writing at least five days a week throughout the month.

Perhaps even more importantly, I finished the novel I was working on, the sequel to Amnesia (that still does not have its own name).  The ending is flat and I know the novel (well, the entire story arc) needs a lot of replotting, rewriting, and fine tuning, but the first draft is done.

Without wasting any time, I'm moving on to my next project, an idea I had a week or so ago.  I'll work on this for a bit, maybe even finish it, and then go back to Amnesia to try and fix it.

I discovered TrackBear has a public profile feature that compiles my writing projects and statistics.  I've turned that on and you can see my FauxNoWriMo progress there, as well as my writing challenge for December: to write almost every day (or, in terms that I could quantify for a challenge, to update at least every two days).  I've also included my most recent project, Amnesia, as well as the new one I'm working on, The Year of the Horse.

Now that NaNoWriMo FauxNoWriMo is over, I'm going to try to get back to a schedule of getting things done.  It'll still be rather limited by Izzy needing something every few hours, but I'm going to see what I can accomplish around her care.  Last week didn't produce the results I wanted, but that was in the demanding last week of November, so hopefully this week will be more productive.

My goals for the week are, therefore:

1. Keep writing nearly every day
2. Clean up and organize in the kitchen and doll spaces
3. Get back to work on doll stuff

I have a bunch of doll projects that were put off when Izzy got sick and then again when November started, but now that that's over, I want to try to knock some of those out before the holidays.  Plus there is a lot of cleaning that hasn't been getting done while Izzy's been sick, in addition to the ongoing organization projects I was already working on, so I want to make some progress on that as well.  It doesn't have to be a lot; I'll settle for small amounts of progress, here and there.

Incidentally, one way I know I've been slowly settling into a schedule is the fact that I'm reading again.  For a long time after Izzy got sick, I was barely able to read (or eat, for that matter).  Finding time to read again has made me feel like my life is getting back to some sense of normalcy.

I am hopeful that the other areas of my life will follow suit.

Weekly Goals, Week 48: Giving Thanks

This week is already shaping up to be a doozy.  My husband is furloughed all week due to the holiday, so we'll have some time to hopefully work on some things around the house (neglected cleaning and organization while Izzy has been sick) as well as wrapping up NaNoWriMo FauxNoWriMo.  Friday, Saturday, and Sunday will be nuts as we have three big days of events in a row: my favorite event, the annual museum write-in, a final push write-in on Saturday, and the Thank Goodness It's Over party on Sunday.  Plus we'll have family obligations for the holiday week as well, so it's sure to be busy!

Last week... well, I'm still not sure where last week went, but I made it so yay!  I managed to write five days out of seven, which isn't every day but is still pretty close.  Other than that, I feel like I didn't accomplish a ton, but I survived it and Izzy did too, so that's what matters.

This week is going to be a little more chaotic, unfortunately, what with the holidays.  I also want to try to get some things done while my husband has a few days off, so I have plans: to clean and organize, to get some shelves up, and that kind of thing.  Small projects, and just a few, but ones that have been waiting for a while.

So my goals are a little more complex this week, but not much:

1. Write every day
2. Run the last week of FauxNoWriMo
3. Clean the kitchen
4. Mount shelves
5. Organize my doll trunks

Hopefully my husband being of work will help free up some time to get things done, because this looks like a scary list considering how little I've been able to manage thus far!  I'm also hoping that Izzy starting to eat more on her own the last few days will result in a lighter workload for us, but that still remains to be seen.

Despite the difficulties, it seems important to note in my Thanksgiving week post how truly thankful we are that Izzy is still with us.  She still has a long road ahead of her, if she's even able to fully recover, but we are grateful for every additional day we have with her.  A month and a half ago, we didn't know if we were going to get any more time with her at all, so the fact that she's still with us truly is a gift!

Weekly Goals, Week 47: Still in Survival Mode

The last week has been a blur, busy and stressful.  True to my survival mode goals last week, I focused mainly on writing and keeping up on NaNoWriMo FauxNoWriMo.  I managed to write six out of seven days last week, including three days where I didn't have a write-in to keep me going.  In fact, the only day I didn't write was Friday, and that was mostly due to our entire day getting hijacked by an emergency vet visit for Izzy.

This week will be similar as far as goals go.  Taking care of Izzy takes up so much of my time that I don't have a lot left to spare, so I'll focus what I have on writing.  For now that will have to do.

1. Keep working on my novel
2. Keep running FauxNoWriMo

I feel like I'm starting to finally adapt to my new schedule.  I have been running myself ragged, going to bed early and then getting up in the middle of the night to give Izzy fluids.  It was getting harder and harder to get up in the middle of the night, so last night I finally drank some late-night coffee to keep myself up so that I could get uninterrupted sleep afterward.

It's still stressful, but I'm hoping I can settle in to the schedule a little better so that it doesn't feel quite so hard.

November Writing Month Check-In

In the past few weeks, I've heard all kinds of creative alternatives to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that are popping up.  Many former Municipal Liaisons are distancing their regions from the original organization after the scandals of the past year or two.  I've heard it called NoNoWriMo (presumably November Novel Writing Month, although "No No" is spot on too), TNT (That November Thing), and of course, our region is calling it FauxNoWriMo.

The point is, NaNoWriMo has become a movement that goes beyond the parent organization.  You can take the MLs out of NaNoWriMo, but you can't take NaNoWriMo out of the MLs or the wrimos!  We're all still writing and doing our own things.

The month has been tough for me due to my cat's illness.  Her care has been demanding and the cost has been high, prompting us to start a GoFundMeow in the hopes of getting a little money toward the ongoing expenses.  (Donations and especially shares are appreciated, thank you!)  I've been so stressed out that I've had a hard time eating, plus I've been pretty sleep deprived from staying up until 3am and 4am to give her water in the wee hours of the morning.  And, of course, I haven't had a lot of time to work on much else, so I'm way behind in writing.  I'm only at 9,830 words so far this month, when usually I'd be at around 20,000 words by this point in November.

I'm still plugging away, though, and considering everything that's been going on, I've given myself permission not to make 50,000 words.  It's more important to me that I write every day as much as possible.  I did miss several days early on in the month, but currently I've written six days in a row, and I hope to keep the streak going.  Even if I only get a couple hundred words written on any given day, it's still progress.  I feel like finding time to write at all right now should be celebrated!

I hope everyone else's November writing project is going well too.  If anyone has lost communication with their region and is missing the feeling of community, please feel free to visit FauxNoWriMo.com, sign up for our mailing list, and check out our calendar of events.  Most of our events are in the Denver area, but we do have some virtual write-ins, and we welcome all writers!