"The carousel never stops turning."

"The carousel never stops turning"--anyone who watches Grey's Anatomy will immediately know where this quote comes from, and what it means.  And everyone will also very likely have their own version of events that seem like life keeps going and never seems to stop throwing punches at you.

Right now, I'm dealing with a mortgage refinance, a solar panel installation, a demanding training schedule as a triathlete, my job as an aerospace engineer, and a check-up on my birth defect of a heart with a hole in it as a result of my annual physical. I've also just finished getting through an appeal of an application for life insurance that was originally denied because of a lack of documentation about that hole in my heart--assuming I am not randomly killed by a comet crashing into my house in the next 3 hours and I survive past midnight today, my husband should be fine to continue to live in our home in the event of my untimely demise.

I don't for a second think that the things that I'm dealing with are any different or larger in magnitude than what most of the world does.  I'm just insanely jealous of people who manage to keep these things in line better than I do.  "It's too bad you grew up--it's horrible being an adult."

Right now, I'm trying to cope with an incompatibility between my commute time, my time working, and my time training for triathlon.  To simplify the description, I was spending between 2 and 3 hours a day getting back and forth to work, and trying to get 2 workouts in most days really didn't mesh with that and my job.

I most recently tried to flip my work schedule to early in the morning and get my training in during the afternoons.  My days consisted of waking up at 4:30, and getting out the door by 5:15 to miss traffic in the morning, followed by working a straight day through without a lunch to 2pm so I could miss the evening rush hour (that goes from about 2:30pm to 7:30pm).  I would arrive home a brain dead zombie, and not really care about the patches of beard I had missed shaving that morning.  I grew irritated with my workouts.  Swimming is 7pm to 8pm, and I had problems winding down afterwards...often leaving me awake until 11:30...followed by a 4:30am wakeup.  I redefined "grumpy." And then I hurt my foot again during a training run.

Your body doesn't heal well or recover well from workouts when you're sleep deprived--and I don't sleep well to begin with, so when I recognize I'm not sleeping well--it's especially bad.  I fell apart on Wednesday and decided I needed to fix something, and I am incredibly fortunate that I'm being allowed to work part of my work week going forward at a facility that is closer to home.  My 1 hour to 1.5 hour commute each way will drop to 5 minutes on those days.  I am hopeful that this change will be the thing that brings my life back into the realm of reasonableness.

I spent some time chatting with my coach about the best way to make use of my new schedule, along with some concern about being 12 weeks out from Full Vineman and not feeling very well trained.   The awesomeness of having Joanna as a coach is that she is a never ending fountain of knowledge about how to deal with any amount of crap that might be going on in your life.  After talking with her and coming up with a game plan, I felt like I had the answer and everything would work out with the new plan.

So, I have this new concept for how to deal with weekly training, and I go to look at my work week and personal life issues for this week, and 3 out 5 days have things that aren't in line with what we talked about.....of course!  Tomorrow, I have a meeting in El Segundo, so commuting happens again--Tuesday, I get to have my heart imaged (yay.), and Friday, I've got to take Brian to the airport in the morning, obliterating when I was going to swim.  The effing carousel never effing stops turning.  And it kind of bothers me that for the screenshot that I took of my schedule, I could not fit the time I have scheduled from morning until night all on the screen at the same time.

It all works though--I've got to reorder stuff during my days, and it will probably take a week or two to get things to fall in line.  I'm just hoping I can look forward to riding the carousel now, rather than feeling like I have to get off of it and run screaming from the fair.