EXCHANGE INTERFACE

You know how people are always telling me to slow down?

Friday night was dinner at parentals. I forgot this was on until B1 made some comment about something I was planning to do with mum next week. I already had a 'supper' night on with my bible study group from last year. At least, I presumed 'tea and toasties' was a supper thing.

After dinner with parentals was a night entitled 'Tea and Toasties' with my bible study group from last year. It was, in fact, dinner. After I'd already had dinner. *sigh* But I wasn't the only one who presumed it was supper rather than dinner.

Anyway I took along the hot cross buns I'd made (they weren't bad, just a bit bready) and they were enjoyed by those present.

I don't sleep particularly well Friday night, and Saturday morning greets me with an alarm at 7:15.

I need to turn a bunch of things off while we put in a bunch of yearly support packs. There's a timeline, a plan...and a lot of new people. Also, a tendency of the new management to kinda be worried about everything that doesn't go precisely to plan. A lot of the people doing this are new and somewhat excitable when things aren't exactly as they expect.

I get my bit done around 8am, except I jump the gun a little, and someone is still trying to use the system I've just switched off. After everyone was warned, still someone is trying to process a payment last thing in the day.

Anyway, that gets done and we're into the work phase! This doesn't require my efforts! Huzzah!

11:15am - lunch with an aunt&uncle on my dad's side of the family. I've spoken of them before; they're nice people but not particularly charismatic. But we love them, they're kind and thoughtful, if a little limited in their outlook. That gets us out to a fairly big shopping centre. We get to keep the leftover, buy a little extra for dinner, buy a few more things, then head back home.

3pm - one of the kids from church (well, a young man, I guess: he's 16) comes by to help me with some things in the garden. We dig out a fig, pull out a dead apricot, dig a hole for a mulberry, and plant the lychee. Then he digs me a trench for sugarcane, and we're done. I chat with him about life, study, and the garden. He was a sweet kid of about 13 when his family first came to church, he's now a sweet young man. And tall. And energetic. He did good, and I'll hire him again the next time I need a strong back to help me do some work!

6pm - dinner with friends at a local Indian place. Good food, good company, all good. We retire to someone's house after to play a game that's a cross between Taboo and Charades, and after 3 rounds, my team wins. By nearly twice as much as the other team. Oops. That goes until around 11pm. Heaps of fun, but late.

The dinner and the game was because my friend M is going on a 5 week cruise with her mum and sister. This is the friend who's father died earlier this year, then she and her fam took a week to Adelaide, and we cleaned some parts of her house for her while she was gone. Anyway, she'll be gone for 5 weeks, and her husband suggested the dinner and the game night before she went, and the only time for it was Saturday and so...

Again, didn't sleep too well on Saturday night. And finally woke around 9am on Sunday. A sleep in! How novel!

Pottered around the garden a little (planted my mum's lotus roots, in the hope that they'll keep growing), then it was off to hockey. More precisely, two games of it. Except that work was just ramping up the part where I have to do some work again.

The original timeline of the work said '3pm' when I expected to be free. It was not, in fact, 3pm. It was 2pm. Just as I'd run myself out in a game against a B-grade team supplemented with some 'next competition up' players, while playing in a B-grade team supplement with some C/D-grade players.

That said, we won 3-2! Although the last one was because the goalie kinda fell over and couldn't get to her feet and back in position. It was scrappy. Also, I missed several opportunities on goal.

This year, if the goal presents itself as a possibility, I should take it. I'm too accustomed to passing it off to someone waiting for the tap-in. I need to just take the shot, particularly if it's just me and the goalie.

I was slated to go straight on for the next game, but logged on to my laptop (I'd brought it just in case) and did a few things. Everything looked green! Hurray! I can go play!

And I did go play for the next 25 minutes of the game. In a half-back position in C-grade, which was a familiar and doable position at this level. I can play just about anything in C-grade (although you'd be stupid to put me in as centre half; I can't control the play that way - I don't calculate and strategise like that, I play the ball on to the next player who can possibly get a goal in).

We won that game, too, fairly easily. Of course, we did have some A/B grade players playing for us.

These are "grading games". They don't count, they're a chance for clubs to get their teams on the field and get a feel for who can play what and where and at what level of game. But they were fun.

Again, B-grade will be a nice stretch, C-grade will be comfortable. I am okay with being comfortable. I am also okay with stretching.

And then I checked in and discovered that one part of my work was not working - because there was a step I'd forgotten to do. *sigh* I told them I'd get the work done once I got home. But it was awkward, realising that I'd dropped the ball on this point. Also, being quizzed about what exactly was wrong in group chats.

Got that done, things appeared to be working. We wouldn't know until Monday, of course, because these are file transfers that only take place during the weekday. But things looked pretty good, we had everything tried and tested, and then we were done.

I went to evening church, partly to see people, partly to say bye to M (friend going on a cruise) and had some good interactions. Sermon was good, although there was something that I didn't feel like was quite a connection in the text as the preacher quoted it - the connection is in one of the other gospels: the parallel text has the connection, this one doesn't quite do it, although I supposed it might be inferenced in the original Greek. Oy.

Didn't sleep great Sunday night either. Whew.

Anyway, the upshot of the weekend is that I'm bloody exhausted and need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

Also: the work that I did hastily on Sunday turned out to be incomplete. A fairly necessary piece didn't end up being put in, and we discovered it when the payments didn't go out around midday. I found out about it around 2pm, because that was when people told me. And a friend had just come over to give me some garlic for planting and we chatted for a bit. It was nice.

So around 2:30pm, I'm trying to work out what's gone wrong and fix it. I'm hoping that everyone isn't getting into a panic - the files are fine, they're just a couple hours after expected. And then once it's fixed and the payment files are shuffled off to the banks, someone from outside the group wants to know if there's anything in place to check for next time.

We'd already covered this in the morning check-in meeting. It's not her area. It's frankly not her business - or, at least, it's the business' business, not hers. And she just kept on hammering with questions.

Can I blame menopause? Please? Or exhaustion? I'm just worn down right now.

And in the middle of all that I did two loads of washing (including bedclothes) and had a dental appointment. (All good, teeth are solid, dentist wants to make me a new hockey mouthgard from a 3D printer that can use resin.)

I am going for a massage in about an hour, and then I'm going to go to bed, possibly before the light fades from the sky.

I'm just so tired right now.

That said, we do have a four-day weekend coming up.

And yes, Dad is coming to Sydney on Saturday, but...that still leaves Friday and Monday. Damn. Need to work out what he's planning to do and where he's planning to do it.

Mental load is exhausting, yo.