Life is bound to bring frustration to each of us.  Doesn’t really matter what stage of life though, it seems.  My laptop is dying.  That’s probably the nicest way to put it.  But that machine is my life!  Sure I have had many other computers and I knew that one day it would come to this but when I waste an HOUR of my already precious time, it’s beyond frustrating!

I’m doing a backup on it to my trusty external hard drive since I haven’t done that since September.  I can’t afford to buy a new one right now so it will either have to do or I’m going to be spending more time in the basement on the desktop which brings other issues… for starters, it doesn’t have anything on it.  All of my files, all of my photos, they are all on my laptop!

Enough said on that… moving on… my original post was going to be about the frustrations of Writer’s Camp.  I have only one camper registered.   This has happened twice… both years that I have had to run camp for five days vs. four days.  I always run it the first week of July so Canada Day there is no camp.

That leads me to Decisions… the other thing that life deals all of us, all the time!  Decisions.  For the better part of this year, as you all know, I have been trying to figure out my next steps in life.  You know that things are happening at my day job that have me pounding the pavement for an alternative.  That said, what is that alternative?  I know what I’d like it to be–something in writing–but I know that a lack of experience will hinder that.

You also know that I have been talking about a start-over plan.  Everything has been put on hold, including reading about writing! It is the end of the school year, you see.  With that comes summatives! I know, not even an actual word!  It underlines in red so I wonder who came up with that one!  Bloody Brilliant as Ron Weasley would say.  These summatives are frustrating.  They have short due dates and in my opinion should have been handed out after March Break.  Why do these kids have to do large projects in short time frames?  I am trying to keep up with helping my daughter get her stuff done because, like all of us, we want our kids to succeed.  This year is huge for change… my daughter is coming up on her graduation and the changes that come with that.  She’s growing up and starting life!

I know that being a writer comes with ups and downs just like everything.

But seriously, here’s what I’m thinking… if camp doesn’t fly this year I think I might throw in the towel on teaching.  I spend so many hours, that are very rare in the first place, working on teaching… advertising, updating material, preparing for class (if it runs)… in a year, and I keep losing sight of my own writing.

I really want to turn my focus back on my writing.  I want to go back and revisit my previous work while having the time and ability to work on new work.  My memoir has been sitting dormant for weeks and all the progress I was making on my old Henry story has joined it.  I also want to revisit my start-over plan notes and see where I’m at with those.  I didn’t get very far.

So frustrations & decisions abound… we carry on through it all.  Through the death of a beloved pet to work stress to summatives, we’ll make it in the long run!