Slip-Sliding Away

Have you ever felt the strange sensation of time slipping through your fingers?

If you follow my blog (and I know at least some of you do…hi guys!) you may have noticed that I failed to post anything for the past two days, and that’s not terribly like me. I miss days every so often, of course, but it’s rare for me to miss two in one week, and very rare for such a thing to happen when I’m not even working (i.e. have plenty of spare time).

But the thing is, I’ve been having one of those times – you know the kind – when even though you’ve got nothing that needs to be done, you still feel as though there aren’t enough hours in the day, like you’re losing time somewhere.

Do you guys realize that we’re already (pretty much) into the last week of January? How the hell did that happen? It feels to me like Christmas just ended and somehow the first three weeks of 2015 just up and flew away from me, never to be seen again.

Of course, there are reasons for this feeling, because there are always reasons. One big reason is that I’ve finally (after a great deal of back-and-forth-ing, I might add) gotten my official call-back for work, complete with flights and camp booked. This means that in less than two weeks I’ll be flying back out to Alberta, away from my husband and daughter for two weeks at a time, freezing my butt off while working 12-hour days for 14 days straight. Now, see, I really don’t mind the fly-in fly-out lifestyle that much, and it has certainly been worth it for my family to be able to get ahead in life the way we have. But this particular job has me cringing a bit for a few reasons. One is that I’ll be working out in the field again (by which I mean literally outside, in the freezing cold, in Northern Alberta), which is something I haven’t done in quite a while (I’ve been working via the control room, all warm and cozy at a desk), so it’s going to be a bit of a shock to the system to get used to again. Another thing is that the camp I’ll be staying at is nothing to write home about – unlike the last two camps I stayed at this one requires me to share a bathroom with my neighbor, the walls are so thin that you can hear every little noise at all hours of the night, and about 80% of the food options make me physically ill. Finally, since the cellular network is so awful where I’m going, and since my work hours coincide with her waking hours/kindergarten hours, I’m fairly certain that I’m not going to be able to Skype my daughter while I’m on this job. It might even be difficult to call her since I’ve been warned that the cell network has only gotten worse since the last time I was out there.

So yeah…understandably, I’m not exactly looking forward to starting this particular job. But then again, with the price of oil the way it is right now, I’d be a complete moron to turn down any kind of work.

Then there’s another factor playing into my feeling of time-loss. The other day when I picked my daughter up at kindergarten I was handed this pile of papers:

That’s right…school registration. This coming September my daughter will be officially starting school. Real school. How screwed up is that? My cousin (whose daughter is 4 months older than mine and thus also starting school this September) and I had a long conversation last night about how crazy it is that we’re sending the girls off to school already. They still seem so young, and my daughter in particular seems so tiny (short girl genes, poor thing). Now, technically I could hold her back another year, because her birthday is only about a week before the cutoff, and parents do, of course, have the option to wait an extra year if they don’t think their child is ready. But I do think my child is ready. She’s a smart kid, she learns fast. She’s already learning the basics of reading, and she’s way better with numbers than most kids I know her age. And she loves “little girl school”, so chances are that she’ll love “big girl school” too. Honestly, I think it would hurt her to be held back until next year way more than it might help her. She is definitely ready to go. Even if it makes me feel like I’ve suddenly gotten very old very fast.

Of course, there’s always lots of little things to destroy my sense of time as well… Like, for instance, the fact that I’m desperately trying to get my manuscript straightened out in time to be able to submit it to the local publisher’s call-out next month. Or how my husband and I are trying to get some stuff done around the house before I’m 3000 miles away and unable to help out. Or the fact that for some reason I’ve been tired as hell lately, so I’ve been wasting even more time snuggled up in bed late many mornings.

All in all, everything culminates in the frustrating sensation that time is rapidly moving away from me and I have no idea where it’s going or how to stop it.

Have you ever felt like time was slipping away from you? How do you deal with it? Do you ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day? If you’ve got kids, do you ever feel like they grow up every time you blink? Here’s a question: how many hours do you sleep in a night, and does it feel like enough (for me, it seems like I can sleep 9 hours a night and still be tired)? Share! Comment! Commiserate!