#SoCS: What a day! (rinse, repeat)

This post is part of the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; this week’s prompt is: Find a word containing “jour” or use it as is. Bonus points if you start or end your post with that word.

Jour is French for, “day.” I thought so, because the phrase, “du jour,” is pretty common, but I Googled it just to make sure, because God forbid I make a bigger idiot out of myself than usual… in print… on the internet. If you’d like to learn more about the word, see the Wiktionary entry. Yes, I am a librarian. Why do you ask?

So… day. Days. This week, these last 2 weeks or so, have held a series of big days in my life. There’s the obvious one, Election Day, which is now transforming into Election Week and we won’t talk about that because it’s exhausting and excuse me for a minute while I go reload WaPo and FiveThirtyEight and…

Yeah. Right. We aren’t going to talk about that. Here are some of the other big days the last three weeks or so have held for me:

• October 19 – the day I started my new job. I love my new job. It’s demanding and intellectually challenging and sometimes leaves me exhausted, but I love it. It’s going to push me to learn and grow professionally, and that’s something I need right now.
• October 28 – the day we moved into our new home here in Tucson. We camped on air mattresses till our furniture arrived and ate entirely too much takeout, and now we are trying to figure out where our stuff should go and why the hell we have so freaking much stuff and can’t we just throw it all in a dumpster and start over. Well, OK, that’s me. The husband is busy cooing soft nothings to his stuff and reassuring it that the Big Bad Wife will not slip it into the trash bin the moment his back is turned. Tell me again why opposites attract.
• November 5 – the day I learned my short story, “Collateral Damage,” won first place in the Arizona Authors Association annual literary contest, short story division. That’s 2 years in a row! Woo! Last year I devoted a whole post to squeeing over my first ever contest win. This year… well, I don’t know. There’s too much going on to squee over any one thing, which is a shame. At some point, though, I may devote a whole post to squeeing over the comments I received from one of the judges who read my work. I’m going to frame that piece of paper so I can look at it whenever I get discouraged.
• November 7 – today! – the day I learned that I did not get chosen by a mentor in the Hunger Games Pitch Wars. I did have 2 mentor teams request full manuscripts, which was honestly better than I expected, so I’m still encouraged, while also being disappointed (and that kind of sounds like how I feel about the election, but we aren’t going to talk about that).
• November 7 – still today! – when I received a very polite and helpful rejection from a horror anthology I’d submitted to. Being rejected was a bummer, but the editor gave me some great feedback to make my story stronger. I’m going to revise and send it somewhere else and keep trying to get better.

So, yeah, that was a lot in a three-week period (and helps explain why I haven’t blogged in awhile). I’ve been really feeling the exhaustion this week, and I still haven’t established a routine in the new place. One night I went to bed at 11:30 (that was the night we aren’t going to talk about), the next night at 8:30. Sometimes I was up at 5 (the morning after the day that shall not be named), other days at 7. I know I’ll settle in, but for now, I’m still on the rollercoaster. Bring on the excitement du jour…