Managing the energy budget

It’s difficult to manage one’s personal energy budget, especially when you don’t really know how much a given activity is going to take out of you until it’s over.

The farm show event was awesome. I knew it would be tiring to spend three days travelling (though my friend drove, for which I was immensely grateful), working on projects, and chatting with the public, but I also knew it would be fun and worthwhile. What I didn’t anticipate was that when I got home, I would be tired … but still all wound up with adrenalin. It took another several days in high gear before I finally came crashing down, and then the exhaustion was bone deep. I was so tired it hurt to move.

I spent most of yesterday sleeping. At one point, I was too exhausted even to knit – and that is a rare thing in my world. I did, however, have a great sleep in the afternoon, and when I went back to bed at a decent hour, I was able to sleep through the night, so clearly I needed the rest.

I did have enough energy to knit after my nap, and I was able to get the autumn afghan back to where it had been before I frogged it: the centre section was not lying flat, and especially as this is a piece for a competition, it needed to be *just right*. I pulled back what I had done, changed the centre structure a little, tried two or three different things and eventually found something that worked. Then it was just easy knitting to get back to where I left off, and indeed, before I went to sleep, I had made several rounds of actual progress beyond the frogged point, so I was happy with that.

Today I’ve spent what energy I have doing some cleaning and tidying – The Reluctant Farmer is home from his two week shift today, and I try to clean the mess a little before he gets here, so that he’s not faced with muddy floors and piles of laundry. It’s not as clean as I’d like it to be, I just didn’t have what it took to do very much, but it’s better than it was, and that’ll have to do.

Tonight we’re trying mini mexican pizzas with ground turkey and home made tortillas … if it works out well, I’ll tell you about the recipe tomorrow.