I've had a revelation. Right after the afore-mentioned meltdown, and just before I worked 54 hours in one week, and along about the time I was studying for a huge skills test at work, but about a week before I started having a sore throat and an earache, I had a revelation. This revelation came courtesy of my faithful reader Karen Anne, who said, "The world isn't going to collapse if this isn't done in four weeks, ya know." She might as well have appeared to me in a burning bush. Seriously. That's how much of a revelation that sentence was. Oh. Yeah. She's probably right.
So instead of working on the house for an hour or so in the morning when I got home from work and then sleeping for only 4 or 5 hours so that I could work on the house again for an hour or so before I went back to work, I slept for 7 or 8 hours and waited until my days off to work on the house. A little. In between sleeping a lot, recovering from this stupid cold, partying with my friends for the first time in ages, and folding laundry while watching chick flicks. After I got all that done, I worked a very little tiny bit on the house. Not nearly enough to be done by tomorrow.
But guess what? The world continued spinning on its axis. Disaster did not befall me. Karen Anne is right.
Karen Anne (and you) just might be tickled to learn what happened next. The best part of slowing down is that AJ took me to a jeweler's on Saturday, where we discovered that we both like emerald-cut diamonds and that my ring size is a teeny 4.5, which meant that the ring he picked out by himself the next day had to be sized way down, so that I had to wait until today for AJ to get down on one knee in the kitchen, in the exact spot where he first said "I love you", so that he could ask me again to marry him, this time with ring in hand. I said yes this time, too. And now, with a chunk of diamonds on a band of white gold, it's official: we really are engaged.