the battery

I feel drained. These past two weeks things have finally caught up to me, and I finally feel the strain of everything adding up. Work is busy, the kids eat up every spare second, and I’m tired of never having any money. I love the city I live in but am starting to resent it for becoming so expensive. I don’t ask for an extravagant lifestyle, but it makes me angry that the province I grew up in; the place I call home, is becoming so bloated will oil money that it is making it difficult for me to afford to even live here. Food costs more, utilities cost more, houses are ridiculous, fuel is insane, and my salary stays the same. The annual 3% cost of living increase is a nice gesture, but when the cost of living here is inflating by 15% every year, it doesn’t do much to stem the sucking sound of dollars leaving my bank account. It disgusts me that the wealth of natural resources in my own country has made it too expensive for me to live in my own province.
I’m starting to feel like an old rechargeable battery. One that has been recharged so many times that it doesn’t stay charged for long anymore. It seems that every time I get a bit of a break and start feeling as though I’ve caught my breath, all it takes is one day at home with the kids to make me feel just as tired as I did before. The things that used to make me feel better, like camping, mountain biking, skiing, and music, are all now unavailable to me due to the demands of my work and my family. It seems that whenever an opportunity presents itself, invariably I either have another commitment to honour or I cannot afford to take advantage of it. It frustrates me to no end.
I’m not sure that there is an easy solution to this. I hope that once my children grow up that I will be able to find the time to recover my sanity, and that I will be able to hold on to a little bit of it until then. When you’re growing up, you always have an idea in your head of what it will be like to be an adult. This is nothing near what I had imagined.

Awaken

Yikes. Almost two weeks since my last post and still no readers, still no comments. All the better, I suppose.

My days lately have been very full, yet I find myself feeling like I’m not accomplishing anything. Work and the kids are taking up every second, and everything else just seems lost in a swirl of commitments, deadlines, and demands. The past ten days have been extremely draining and I feel tired. Even after sleeping, I just can’t seem to recover. They say you get lots of sleep when you’re dead, but I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

As tired as it makes me, working my schedule has opened my eyes to the beauty of mornings. I am really not a morning person. In fact, I will go to great lengths to avoid them. When I wake up early, I am exhausted for the rest of the day. It doesn’t even matter how much sleep I got the night before. I could go to bed at 4 pm, but if I have to wake up before 6 am I am going to be tired. For this reason, the only two things that can get me (grudgingly, at that) out of bed before dawn are skiing and my wife. Working nights, I am coming home just as the sun comes up, and it is truly beautiful. When I work days, I am on my way to work at the same time, so I get to see the day blaze into glory just the same. This past week, driving to work in the morning and seeing the sun slowly lift it’s fiery bulk from the horizon, I finally understood the big deal that people make about mornings. I might even have to make an effort to see more of them.