Contrary

I've been feeling a bit contrary lately (although my name's not Mary), but mostly it's because some "contrary" things are going on.

The main one is that now that we had decided to wait to buy another house and stay in this one for a while longer, there's someone interested in renting it [sigh]!! Just looking at houses online today made me depressed because given what happened last time, house-hunting has lost its charm for me. Besides it's such a time suck and so draining! Not to mention that I'm about to travel and won't be here so we can choose another house and buy it in time for the tenants to move in, were we to rent this house. :(

I have tons of things to do to prepare for my trip but I have no energy whatsoever to do them. The worst of all is going shopping with the boys. They haven't been behaving badly or anything (I spent the whole day out last Friday and it was fine), but I dread getting them in the car and going out, I have to entertain them, keep them nourished, and keep them from fighting, all while trying to concentrate on the tasks at hand.

I wish I could be excited about going to Brazil, but I'm just apprehensive. I won't be taking my laptop, so I have to try and have the conference papers partly ready, and I have to load all the documents I may need into a flash drive. Then, I feel stressed out just thinking about all the things I want to do in Brazil and how I should be planning carefully every minute of my month there so I can do all I want.

Well, but I know that I shouldn't really worry about the conference presentations -- conferences don't really faze me since I know not too many people, if any, are generally interested in other people's research (at least this happens often to me here since nobody cares about Brazil -- I'm hoping it might be different there, obviously), so it's not a big deal to write do an oral presentation. As for the planning, I better relax and let it happen, although this time I'll be traveling around and need to tell people of my schedule, at least.

Sorry to be so boring, and I warn you that there may be some heavy posting ahead since I wrote some posts in my journal, actually, and hope to transcribe them in the next few days. I also want to post some fun photos from the last few weeks. I know that those will be welcome, though :)