Updating while I can

I should know better than to make commitments on my off days. I had promised a friend I'd beta her story today, which is the only full day "off" I have before going back to Ottawa when Bean would also be in preschool. It was a 24k story, so I figured the 4-5 hours I had between the time pdaughter took Bean to daycare and came home herself from class would be more than enough to do it, especially since the friend in question writes very clean copy.

So naturally today there was heavy snowfall and pdaughter and Bean are both coming down with colds, after being over the last one they had for, what, not even two weeks? So they stayed home.

I love Bean to death, but I can't work on anything requiring concentration, like writing, when he's around. He's a naturally exuberant child, and so all his play tends to be at volumes that prevent me from focussing on anything. Even happy screaming is screaming, and his normal chatter is still very loud. That's not counting his coming over at intervals of 30 seconds to 5 minutes and trying to climb in my lap, or tugging on my arm, or shoving my hands away from the keyboard. "What you doing?" "Come with me, Dah-dee! Come see!" "No, not look at your 'puter, COME!" That's on a good day. On bad days there's screaming and whining and shrieking and throwing himself dramatically on the floor and drumming his heels as hard as he can when he's frustrated. It makes editing a challenge, to say the least.

So instead of settling down around 8:30 with my work this morning I ended up waiting until not quite 10:00 for the rush hour traffic to be over, and took myself over to Starbucks to get it all done. The traffic was still terrible due to weather, so I only got here at about 10:40, and have been working steadily ever since. I just finished, but since I won't be able to write when I get home, I'm fulfilling my self-imposed obligation to update LJ every day now. Ten minutes to post here won't make that much of a difference, I'm hoping.

I've had a splitting headache since yesterday, which neither Advil nor Tylenol are doing a damn thing to shift. Being awoken multiple times in the night didn't help, either, but that couldn't be helped. Right now it feels like I'm being stabbed through the eye with a knitting needle.

I'm hoping to be able to do some of the chores tonight that I'd planned on doing this morning as "breaks" from the editing. Dishes, laundry, all that. That was the original plan for the day. I realise that not being able to get stuff done when I'm with Bean makes me a terrible person (after all, everyone else in the universe manages to do it, just not me, which makes me a very special brand of incompetent, I guess), but at least I'm trying to get it done when I can. That must count for something, right?