… is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” This is one of my favorite lines in Oscar Wilde’s play “An Ideal Husband”. This play was also made into a movie with Jeremy Northam and Rupert Everett (which I highly recommend!).

I need to keep this line in mind more often. Especially during weeks like the one that I’ve had. I often forget that I am just as important as everything else that I am throwing myself into. I spend a lot of time doing things for others, thinking of others, and putting my own needs aside. I volunteer to do things that I really don’t want to do, but I know that it has to be done. I start out with good intentions, but it quickly spirals into something that I do only because I feel obligated.

I have been very frustrated lately and it doesn’t seem to get any better no matter what I do. I must be causing these feelings myself, but I have yet to discover the why or the how so that I can solve the issue and move on. I don’t enjoy being frustrated. Nobody does. So why do I continue to do this to myself??

Is this God’s way of teaching me to Just Say No? Or is this his way of saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? I know one thing. “Hey, God? Are you listening? Could you maybe not trust me so much to be able to handle as much as I have going on? If you could help me get out of the things that I don’t want to do anymore I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!”

One of my frustrations concerns my possible future home. The bad thing is that I’m not even looking forward to maybe purchasing my grandma’s house. I’m so tired of the whole thing. Talk about something that has been frustrating from the start! It seems like everything that I’ve attempted when it came to my grandma’s stuff, it always was way harder than it needed to be and the results weren’t nearly as good as I had hoped.

Let’s start at the beginning. First it took almost three months to get the paperwork together before my dad and aunt could visit with the lawyer. The lawyer said that it wouldn’t be a hard process and that once it got started it should take maybe a month to finish. That sounded good, right? Except it took the lawyer two months just to get the letters out to the relatives to start the process! TWO MONTHS! To write letters!! In the meantime the best months of the year are passing by and I’m unable to do anything on the house because my uncle is still living there. I did freak out on my dad in June and that at least motivated him (I think) to talk to his siblings about at least cleaning grandma’s stuff out. After all, nobody had touched anything of hers since she went into the nursing home in 2006. We finally get in there to start cleaning things out and my aunt can’t hardly throw anything away. My grandma was not a wealthy woman so she doesn’t really have much of value. Unless you attach some kind of sentimental value to it, but even then I don’t want that much stuff cluttering up my life. It’s just stuff. I have my memories, which I prefer. So the cleaning didn’t work out very well. Then she had a bunch of film that hadn’t been developed. I sent the 110 film away to be processed, and after a month I hadn’t received the pictures. I e-mailed the company and they claimed that they had shipped them out on July 19th via UPS. They checked with UPS and there wasn’t even a record of them receiving my package to ship. I received a package in the mail yesterday from a lady in Florida whom I didn’t know. It turns out that the company had shipped my pictures in with hers, so she sent them to me since they had my name and address on them. I sent her a thank you note this morning with money to cover what she had to pay in postage. There were eleven rolls of film and I think that the film had degraded because it was so old. The pictures all looked like there was a thick fog when the pictures were taken. I learned something about my grandma that I had kind of already known; 1) She really loved the dog who didn’t like anybody else and 2) her second love was my cousin. There are a million pictures of that dog and my cousin. There were a handful of pictures of the rest of us. I told my mom that my aunt owes me $60. lol

That’s just one of my frustrations this week. I wish that I could spend the weekend just doing things for myself, but I have my group picnic on Sunday. I don’t want to go, but I have to. I’m beginning to resent the group. Not the people in it, but the group in general and all of the time that I have to give up for it. And for what? What am I getting out of it? Maybe I’m being selfish. *Sigh* Maybe.