Bob2 is still alive.

I moved him out onto the porch this morning. I realize that I probably should have done this a week or more ago, but I’ve been a little slow on the uptake in general lately. But this morning I came into the office to clean off my desk so I can pay the bills so our electricity stays on and our phones stay connected, and I saw Bob sitting there, indoors, not getting as much sun as he would like. So he’s outside now. The porch is shady in the mornings, but catches sun from about noon until sunset, which is about 9pm these days, so he should be happy.

Now I should go back to cleaning the desk, so I can proceed to paying the bills. And then writing. Because there is always writing to be done.

When I was little, my favorite color was pink.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s very cute that Betsy was a typical little girl who liked pink girly things. You’re not seeing the sinister angle. The other side.

See, I went a little bit overboard on the pink. If it came in pink, I wanted it in pink. I had pink jeans, not blue jeans. I had pink tires for my bicycle. I played with Barbies not because I particularly liked them, but because everything came in pink. When we moved across town and into a new house, I got to pick the carpet that would go in my room–without a second’s hesitation, I picked the pinkest carpet I could find in the store. And then I tried to convince my parents to paint the walls pink, too. They stopped me at a pink border around the top of the wall, but for years I was still happy because the white walls of my bedroom looked pinkish because they reflected all the other pink in the room. I had pink curtains, pink sheets, a pink bedspread, pink stuffed animals. . . . it was amazing. I’ll have to find a photo and scan it so you can get even the beginning of an idea of what it looked like.

It was great until I entered my teenage years. Then I revolted against pink, though I couldn’t do much about the carpet. I never, ever wore pink clothes. I changed the curtains and everything else, and tried to pretend my pink phase had never existed. Halfway through high school, I convinced my parents to let me take down that awful pink border and paint the walls and get new carpet (which they probably only agreed to since they knew I’d be moving out and they’d be buying new carpet for the room anyway, since no sane empty nesters have one pink room).

It wasn’t until I was out of college for two years that I voluntarily bought anything pink again, and that was half because I found the perfect laptop bag for 75% off its normal price simply because it was pink. So I’ve been easing myself back into a judicious use of pink for the last three years or so, and I think it’s going pretty well.

But the funny thing? Even back when my favorite color was pink and everything I owned was pink, my favorite favorite color was orange.

Why?

Because I liked orange popsicles best.

Ah, the complexities of childhood.

The problem with blogging while fighting off depression is that there’s not a lot of witticism or carefree fun that comes naturally. There’s a good deal of cynicism and gloomy introspection, and there are far too many blogs out there filled with both of those for me to feel that adding my bit here would benefit anyone in any way.

That makes it rather hard to blog. I’m not saying that I only blog sunshine and roses, all the time, just that nobody wants to listen to me whine and, frankly, blogging about what I haven’t gotten done does not help my depressive cycle.

At all.

So I avoid it.

Then I feel silly for wanting to post an entry talking about my good day yesterday, because by normal-people standards, I didn’t do all that much. By depressed-person standards, it was a victory.

I cleaned the house (the office wasn’t bad, really, but the rest felt like a mess), ran a very full dishwasher and then put the dishes away, and did almost all the laundry. We took the dog to the dog park, and, perhaps most importantly, I marked up manuscript pages with edits. It’s been several weeks since I really did any work on the manuscript. It’s been floating in the back of my mind, as always, but I haven’t been able to pull together the brain power to work on it. It’s one of my least favorite parts of depression. But now I’m looking forward to going through and making those changes and then moving forward again. It’s a good feeling.

So yesterday was huge. Great. I also opened the curtains for the first time in five days. Funny how letting light into the house can help. I ended the day feeling like it had gone well, which is significant. Too many times, even a good day ends with me feeling discouraged and frustrated, and that’s no good at all.

Today has been pretty good, too. I went to work, but my boss didn’t, so I got to come home early. We ran some errands that I’ve been putting off, I’m finishing the last of the laundry now, and then my official task is to read a library book that I’ve renewed so many times I can’t renew it again. It’s due tomorrow evening, so I’m dedicated to reading it. Happily, Matt has things to do this evening, so the time is pretty much open for me to do my reading.

That’s about all. It’s not very exciting. Depression rarely is.

Apologies yet again for failing in my blog schedule… I’ve uploaded more photos from the trip and made comments over on flickr, in the Utah album. Head over there and check it out. The first five or six photos have already been posted on the blog, but the rest are new.

I’ve mostly been reading this week, between efforts to settle back into the routine of being home. On that front, it’s been a rough week. We had several special events on campus, which meant shuffling our usual schedule, and I’ve been fighting off a rather persistent bout of depression recently. It manifests as an extreme inability to focus combined with rather overwhelming lethargy. I’m working, bit by bit, to keep moving forward, or at least not stagnate entirely. It seems a hopeless business most days, but I have good friends and family who keep me in line and crack the whip when I slide a bit too close to the edge of full-out wallowing.

So that’s where things stand. It’s a busy, rather stressful month in the Whitt household, since June is extra-busy for Matt and his youth ministry responsibilities. He’ll be home eight days between now and July 4th. I expect to spend rather a lot of time with Shiloh at the dog park while he’s gone. I’ve got a few other plans, too, which I won’t expand upon at the moment. We’ll see what the month brings.