why? why? why?

Josh's aunt is FOREVER calling me and offering me opportunities for part-time or short-term jobs, and I am FOREVER turning her down because I had a baby, and then a toddler, and then when I finally got my life together and started taking work, whoops! I got pregnant again, and then the morning sickness, and then the placenta previa, and then the breech baby, and then I gave birth, and now I have a newborn, and blah blah blah. Suffice to say, I've said no about 9 times to different job offers.

The other day, she called to ask whether I'd be willing to proofread someone's dissertation for him. English is apparently his second language, he needs help, and he's willing to pay for it. I looked around at the chaos of my life, and eyed the dust bunnies and the dirty windows and started calculating how many hours of house cleanings I could hire with one proofreading, and I said yes.

Unfortunately, I forgot about that whole poor student part of the equation, so he's only paying me $2 a page to proof them, but still, $2 is $2. I work out of my house during naps and while Gabe is at school, and if I am working then I can totally justify buying a soy latte at Starbucks because it helps my muse, you know?

What I did not consider, though, is that I have no time these days. Like seriously, no time. I barely have time to eat and shower and do laundry, and fitting in 200 pages of dissertation is no piece of cake. Plus, did I mention it is a dissertation in ENGINEERING? To be specific, supply chain management and engineering and equations and stochastic models of blahbity blah blah blah. I sometimes have to reread the same sentence 4 times just to get through it, because hello? I am a lawyer, not so much with the engineering. But again, $2 is $2, and he is a lovely young man, and very nice and he does need help, so I push my way through and make my word changes and slight revisions and gloss over the way-too-complex-equations and graphs.

All of this is to say that between the proofreading and the fact that we are leaving for California and Florida on Monday for 3 weeks, I barely have time to breathe, and I certainly do not have time to be writing out this blog post. Hi, my name is procrastination.