In my house, there is an area that is not entered by anyone. It is her room, and is the wasteland that has been overcome by what we lovingly refer to as Hurricane Bri. It’s not so much dirty and it is just cluttered with her junk and clothes. I am on her at least four times a week to just clean it up, and every few days she straightens the mess enough to keep me satisfied, but it is still a disaster zone.

The rest of the house is clean and I send her a text message daily after school, that says, “Don’t even think about making a mess anywhere else.” We get home about the same time, so there is not a lot of room for her to spread her destruction. This past week, we had Mark and Sheryl over several times (her friends, Sam and Sabrina, were here too), so I stressed that the room needed to be cleaned. Instead, she shut the door and created a sign that says:

404 Error: The room that you have tried to reach cannot be found and is temporarily unavailable. Please try a different link.

She thinks she is funny. The other night when Sheryl was over for dinner, she broke from the dining room and started running up the stairs yelling, “I’m going to see Bri’s room.” Bri was in full pursuit after her, trying to head her off. Mark and I were just laughing. I had told Sheryl the other day, that when I went to wake Bri up on Thursday morning, she wouldn’t answer. I then heard a meek voice coming from Sheryl’s old room, asking me what time it was. Bri can’t even stand her own mess, so she was sleeping in the bed set up in the other room. Sheryl was cracking up and telling me she had nieces the same age, who had tried to pull the same stunt.

For the most part, as long as she contains it to her living area, I have tolerated it, waiting for her to get sick of it. She finally has. Friday, she asked me if I would help her neatly put everything away. Today is the day for it. Luckily for me, it only took a couple of weeks for her to come around. The potential that people are coming over to the house more often and might catch a glimpse of her laziness, has shamed her into wanting to correct the situation.

Mom is happy. Do your kids do this kind of stuff with their rooms?

It is 10:35pm and I am not sleeping. In 5 hours and 55 minutes, I have to be awake to get the kids to school and head to work, and I can’t sleep. This is not right. I have literally been running since 4:30am this morning.

On Thursday from 7-9, Bri has the rehearsals for the new orchestra she has joined. This is something that her cello teacher got her involved in. The same guy who told me not to let her join the youth orchestra she wanted to be part of, because of the weekly three-hour rehearsal and its requirement of a nine-month commitment. The new orchestra has a two-hour session weekly, is across town, will go on indefinitely, and there is a performance every month. The upside is that the group is mainly adults and Bri is its youngest player. The downside is that it involves me driving out to get her at 9:00pm. Ideally, I would pick her up from school on Thursdays, bring her to the office and Sheryl would bring her to her teacher’s house after work, because she lives out there and it saves me from driving both ways. The exception being nights like tonight, where he had a gig and couldn’t make the rehearsal, so I had to drive both ways.

That wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to wake up so early to get her to school, need to race her back here to go to sleep, and if she did nothing else. No chance. Honor orchestra is right around the corner from us again, and that will be another three-hour rehearsal on Tuesday nights, and that’s right you guessed it, across town again. She also has her big state solo competition coming up in October, and because of the competition in December in Chicago, she has to be at two after school rehearsals every month. Let’s not forget lessons on the weekend, and that’s just the cello commitments. Freaking insane.

All of this running around occurs after I spend 9 or 10 hours at the office. Add to it that I actually insist on having a life outside of my job and cello, and things get a little dicey. Poor Mark, he is being such a trooper about all this, not complaining at all about not being able to see me as often. He has offered to help me get Bri from Point A to Point B, if I get tied up, so we are testing the cello fit in his car this weekend. Hopefully, it will fit. Sheryl has also been a blessing, because she helps me out a lot with Bri.

The big thing to suffer this week has been yoga. I haven’t gone at all, because I can’t manage to squeak it in. It’s funny, I have a calendar, plan everything out, and then one thing like tonight gets screwed up, and it blows the whole schedule out of whack. I crave a normal routine, as working in reactionary mode is getting old. Very, very old. Hear that, Bri?

This entry is more of vent than anything else, so I am not looking for sympathy here. My mouth actually has the ability to say “No,” I just don’t exercise it enough. Then, I get overwhelmed by everything I have taken on, and just count the minutes until I completely snap and come unglued. Don’t worry, it’s still early in the semester. I’m not even close, yet. However, by November, I should officially be mental.

Now, It is 5 hours and 33 minutes until I have to wake up. Goodnight all.

Most of you know that I do not watch TV. You could ask me about what happened on the most popular show on the air, and I would just stare at you, without a clue. The only TV in the house is in Bri’s room. Actually, there’s a tiny little one that collects dust and never is powered up unless there is major breaking news. Mostly, it’s a doorstop.

Mark watches TV. A lot of TV. There is a huge television in every room of his house. When he was on his trip and I brought Bri over there for the first time, her first comment was, “Why does he have so many TVs?” His viewing is not so much broadcast television (except for Cubs games, who as of this moment have the best record in both leagues), but he watches TONS of movies. Over the past few months, I have seen more movies than I have probably seen in the last two years. I rather enjoyed catching up on all the box office hits that I had missed because they weren’t age appropriate for Bri. He teases me a lot about this. He often asks me, “Did you see [insert title}?” Then it dawns on him that he is talking to me, and he immediately retorts, “What am I saying? You haven’t seen anything.” That’s not entirely true. While I can count them on one hand, there are a few movies that I have seen that Mark never has.

So, there.

Now that he has met Bri, he finally made it over to the house the other day for the first time. During the tour, he noticed the lack of a large, screened display connected to coax. Yesterday after work, he brought one over here that he was no longer using. It’s in my bedroom and it’s big. At first, I was a little unnerved by it, because I didn’t think I would watch it. That is, until I couldn’t sleep last night. I piddled around the house, and finally just laid down and flipped it on. I watched all kinds of things and I really LIKED it. Later on today, I think I will scrounge out the DVD player from the garage and hook it up, if I can find it. This could be a great way for me to unwind, plus, I forgot how comforting it is just to have the background noise.

Am I weird?