An attempted cure for waking up on the wrong side of the bed.

Well, for no good reason, I just didn’t feel very happy today. I woke up with an edge of crabbiness that didn't lift.

As I progressed through the morning, I felt overwhelmed with a bunch of small but important but non-work-related tasks. So I felt restless and couldn’t settle down. When I was working on my book, I was distracted by all the other things I needed to do. When I was trying to tackle some of those tasks, I felt guilty about not working on my book. And the Big Man has seemed distant and irritable for the last few days, which made me feel irritable, too.

I kept getting thwarted. I couldn’t get answers to my questions on the phone; no one was returning emails; then my email got screwed up.

Another factor in my mood is that in ten days, I’m going out of town for two weeks. That’s a long time to be away, and I’m daunted by the prospect of getting packed and setting up everything to run smoothly while I’m away. Plus it makes me feel sad, and almost panicky, to think about being away from the Big Girl and the Little Girl for such a long time.

Once I noticed that I was officially in a Bad Mood—at about 10:30 a.m.—I started to apply all my research to try to turn the day around.

It’s now 6:00 p.m. During the course of the day, I exercised. I answered the phone with a cheerful voice. I made entries in my three-blessings journal and my one-sentence journal. I acted as happy as I could. I went to a meeting early to have a chance to catch up with people beforehand (but I had to cut out early, which made me feel bad.) I walked out of my way to go to a diner where I could sit outside and work in the sunshine. I let the Big Man work through his mood instead of pestering him about it, which makes me feel better but annoys him. I called my sister. I went through a bunch of unanswered emails. I took the time to chase the Little Girl around the apartment, to hear her shriek with laughter. I crossed two major nagging tasks off my to-do list (I’d been procrastinating for months; it took me a total of 24 minutes to get them done.) I made a home schedule and a packing list for my trip, and reminded myself that two weeks isn’t a horribly long time. Most important, I made sure that I did two solid hours of real writing—that’s not much, but I was so distracted this morning, I was on track to get nothing done at all.

I can’t say that I’m ending the day in an ebullient mood, but taking all these steps did make me feel a lot better.

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I just discovered a great blog, Antique Mommy, about the adventures of a woman who had a baby in her forties. Very funny on parenting issues. The site gives me a weird feeling, however, because Antique Mommy and I use variations of the same Typepad design. Reading her blog is like getting a letter in the mail from a stranger--a letter written in my handwriting.