I rode Tanza a little bit yesterday

 I didn't get ducks in a row to be able to haul anywhere but at least I got a little bit of riding in.   I also burned trashed and a bunch of tumbleweeds that had blown against the driveway wings and into the yard.  Feels like I did more than that, but I did spend a lot of time lurking on my favorite blog. 

Today I took a walk,  got the door off the freezer that died so I could clean the kitty litter out of it.   I'm waiting for the litter to dry more so I can shovel or rake it away from the freezer with less mess.  Then when I'm not collecting that clay on my muck boots I'll scrub it with some bleach.  If the smell can be removed so it won't put the horses off their feed the freezer will be handy to store horse feed in.  If the smell is permanent then I'll do the got junk or equivalent to have it hauled away.  

K took the weekend off.  Saturday she was meeting a potential new family.  I need to update my care dot com ad and try to get someone to come in regular on weekends and probably Tuesdays and Wednesdays when I have a lot of online meetings.  Then I need to overcome my fear of rejection and start networking to try to get some riding meetups on weekends and get back into being a trail rider, maybe work back up to being a low level endurance rider. 

Work has been better having K here.

 I had not realized how much the interruptions to care for dad here and there were affecting my ability to focus and get work tasks done.  I had the mindset that "it isn't that many total hours caring for dad and the horses, I have time left to get work done and I was getting work done" but I was focusing much better this last week when K was getting dad his eggs and so on.   So it would be nice to have someone here more of the time when I should be working.   But if I just get more days or part days covered it will help tremendously.   

I'm so burned out I can't make myself do things

 I'm being stupid.  If I will suck it up and try some of the independent aides I can probably get myself to a point of being able to take a weekend really truly off now and again and that would probably save me from having a full on break down.  Perhaps part of me wants to have a breakdown.  Stupid.  Oh fandamily and neighbors would probably step in to get dad cared for; but I doubt anybody would try to help me.  I'd end up in a mental health facility and some of those are just about milking every drop of money out of any insurance and whatnot and do nasty stuff to keep from releasing patients.  

The caregiver role is stupidly lonely.  One of the IT guys reached out to me if I need an ear because he went through it with his dad.  He moved back home for a while to help his mom take care of his dad.   With as common as dealing with this shit is it seems like there would be scads of online forums and support groups offered by the community and so on; but that really does not seem to be out there.  At least not easily found online.  Perhaps a lot of people are in the same emotional boat as me and feel like they shouldn't find it such a hassle and don't want to admit they get screaming frustrated at their parents at times.  At least dad can't hear when I am ranting at him for getting decrepit.  

Waiting to hear from the possible live in aide

 I'm very poor at reading people.   I got a feeling she was mostly being polite and isn't going to choose to live out here "in the boonies"; but I could easily be wrong there.  This neighborhood feels quite urban to me having lived in a really rural area as a kid.  But she got lost trying to get here.  Was on the correct road but didn't come far enough east to find our house and called me and asked if I could meet her at the intersection.  She said she had a family in Aspen wanting to hire her and would decide by Tuesday and let me know.  Also said she wasn't sure about being clear up in Aspen, so far from the metro area so who knows.  I wondered later if she was trying to get me to offer higher salary but no way I'm going to try to outbid folks who can afford to live in Aspen. 

I have had some folks inquiring about coming on the weekends and if I got someone good for weekends that would be big help to me in feeling safe to try to schedule trailhead meetups.  

I dropped the ball on work year rollover.   I logged in at UTC midnight and a bunch of stuff had started failing early in the day.  Oh well.  I was not on call and no one volunteered to switch Xmas weekend with me so that I would be on call for the year rollover so they can just live with the short outage they had.