Living better? Challenge accepted

Did you know there's something called referring spam? I don't understand the whole of it, but from my experience so far it makes it look like you have a ton of pageviews when really NO ONE is looking at it. My ego burst when I realized that, no, it's very unlikely that so many people in Russia and Germany would give a shit what I'm writing about and all these "pageviews" I was suddenly getting were probably due to this random website that kept showing up as a traffic source.

Fuck you referring spam. Instead of 600-plus pageviews, I probably have something closer to like 300. I'm guessing. I hope it's more than that, but truly have no idea because there are rarely comments and I have a grand total of three public followers.

I'm done letting something as ridiculous as pageviews get me down, because that's exactly what happened. Considering my livelihood once came from a byline, I have a tendency to thrive on and feed off of the knowledge someone is reading what I write.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I feel better.

In search of positivity and space

I took a break — from here, from the gym, from feeling like a useful member of society.

In all honesty, I needed it. The morning after my last entry, I packed the kids in the car and took off for my parents house about two hours away. We only stayed a couple days, but it was enough to make me realize things weren't going as planned around here. I was truly beginning to feel overwhelmed again. If you've been keeping up with me and my stories, you know this feeling started a while ago and I've been trying to get back on track. Bad weather and bad attitudes (mine and Josie's, which has likely been caused by mine) have been blamed.

So has the furniture, the dog, the car, the money ... You get the picture.

I decided earlier this week to nip it in the bud. We've been talking about what we need to do to fix the house up and potentially sell it and that has put me in full on "show ready" homeowner mode. I sent an unused television stand home with my parents on a recent visit and then took the baker's rack down — we used it to hold bath towels and toiletries in the bathroom — and repurposed a basket already in the bathroom for the newly homeless towels.