Can. Not. Deal. With. Any. More. Thank. You.

I am at the place I reach occasionally - where I am kind of overwhelmed and where stuff keeps happening. Stuff that, if it happened in isolation, would not be a problem. But when the stuff gangs up, I just want to crawl under the covers and suck my thumb for a few hours.

1. There's some bad interpersonal juju going on all around me:
a. between a student and a colleague, and I'm having to adjudicate
b. related to the (4 years ago now) church split. And this is REALLY bad juju, like people using influence in ways they should not.

2. The kids were IN-SANE last night in youth group. It's getting to the point where I wonder if there's even a point in continuing, if they're getting ANYTHING out of it other than "hey, did you know we can climb up onto the roof via this drainpipe?"
(And yes, that actually happened, while a couple kids were waiting on their rides. Part of the issue is that my co-worker and I have essentally no back-up so it's two of us with sometimes 20 kids - and it's like watching baby chicks - you get three in line and four more have wantered off.

3. My furnace is acting up again. It will work okay for a while, and then decide to shut itself down. It's flashing either code 33 or code 34 at me (depending on when it shuts itself down). I thought I had it fixed - got it to run overnight at least - by turning the blower switch to "ON" rather than "AUTO" but now it's doing the "Okay, I'm done heating now" prima donna thing again this morning. Either of the codes it's showing could be about eight different things, depending, and some of them I'm not even sure what the combination of words in the owner's manual means: "Flame rollout switch lockout"? Huh?

I've got a call in to the repair place but I'm not sanguine; when they came before for the flashing "34" they reset it and said, "you shouldn't have any more problems."

I've decided that the code 34 is just the furnace's way of giving me "the finger" and saying "I don't want to heat your house."

Maybe it's time for a new furnace but I can't even begin to think of facing all the tsuris that would entail with (a) getting someone to take away the old furnace (b) getting a plumber in for the gas lines (c) getting an electrician in to check out the electrical and (d) finally getting someone in to install the dang thing.

Remember that where I live it can take two weeks for a workman to decide to come when called, so you can imagine how close to running screaming down the hall I am when I think of getting a new furnace.

4. I have to bake a cake this afternoon (while waiting on the furnace guy I guess) for the AAUW meeting tonight. I also think I'm supposed to get the key to the place we're meeting but I'm going to have to call someone and ask them to do it as I will be waiting on the furnace guy. I also have to help set up the coffee before the meeting and pick up an older member who no longer drives.

(If I could just bail on the meeting - which I cannot - things would be 100% easier. It's mainly worrying about all the things that need to happen with the meeting coming off that are getting to me this morning).

5. And finally: my ISP has changed my webmail interface to something ugly and new and supposedly with "Spamcontrols" but I am now getting more spam than before. And for some reason comments you post here are no longer being mailed to me, which makes me sad - I mean, I can go on the site and see the comments but if someone's posting a comment on an older post, I may never see it. (My older posts could be positively infested with comment spam and I'd not know).


Like I said: none of those things are really all that big in the grand scheme of things. But trying to deal with them all at once has taken me to about the limit of my resilience. If someone calls me up "needing" something "right now," I fear I will either get cranky or go all wavery-voiced and say, "You need what?? I don't have HEAT in my house right now. I have to bake a cake this afternoon. I'm being called on to be a peacemaker in situations I am not equal to!"