Day off. I plan to spend the morning cleaning and the afternoon doing schoolwork. Jonah's got a friend coming over later, one whose parents are more skittish than I am about the social aspect of parenting. It feels weird to be the outgoing one.
I knitted a cotton sunhat this week. I thought it looked ugly and shlumpy at first, but after a couple of days I see it's cute and shlumpy instead. I do that with every project. I expect to weave in the final ends and be awed by the project's holy glow, but it's still just a hat. It's like that with writing, too. That's why writers are advised to put a newly finished manuscript "in a drawer" for a few weeks. (Used to be a physical manuscript in an actual drawer, now it's bits on a hard drive.)
I need money. An online job would be great, but of course those are rare. I can't write website copy right now (my head is too full of college right now) but I could do data entry or something. The reason I hesitate to get a job outside the house is because I'm already leaving the kids home alone more than I'm comfortable with, and also because the migraines are getting more frequent again. Fragrance exposure made worse by stress.
I'm working on the stress part, which is just a matter of adjusting to all the changes of the last year, but of course I can't do anything about the fragrance part. I think the city put air fresheners in the library, which they had approved at the end of last year, right before I came aboard. You're probably thinking, "But Sherri, can't you tell when there's air freshener present?" I've always smelled strong, perfumey odors at times in the library. Usually I can pin it on a customer and move away and be fine. But lately I've been smelling it where there are no customers. A problem with air freshener (and any fragrance) is that you stop smelling it after a while, so it's hard to know if it's there all the time. Also, if this is AF I'm smelling, it doesn't always smell the same. I'm wondering if the dispensers are the atomizers that rotate different scents.
All I know is my eyes are irritated at the library, blurring my vision and spawning the subsequent evening migraine, and when I get home my clothes and hair carry a strong fragrance. If I work two days in a row, forget about it. It seems to be better to work a couple of long days than many short days per week. Maybe I'll ask my boss if we can do that. I hesitate to ask if the air fresheners have been installed, because I had a false alarm a few months ago and I don't want to compound my perceived hysteria.
But anyway, all that fragrance talk came from why I still want to work from home, if at all possible.
And now I must shower.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
