J. once worked with a guy who had a theory that the school year could be divided into a set of days.

September and October are Monday; November and December are Tuesday. You get the picture.

This means that we are still in Monday morning for another week and a half. Which is fitting, actually, because I’m really feeling like I need a coffee break right about now.

There’s my residency at The Pas Regional Library which is going really, really well. It’s such a relief to the isolating lifestyle of writing, and such a deep pleasure, to be able to occupy a room for a few hours, a couple times a week, with other adults and teenagers who love to work with words as much as I do.

But then there’s also the effort to get our new dining room done in time for family visitors along with the struggle to retrain our cat to use her litter because she decided, for some typically oddball cat-brain reason, that the plywood floor of the new dining room suited her better as a bathroom spot while we were away in Ontario this summer.

And on Tuesday we took Mowat to the vet hospital in Saskatoon for his second TPLO surgery because, out on the trail a couple weeks ago, he took a too-fast turn on the leash and tore the cranial cruciate on his second leg.

Looking on the bright side, the timing couldn’t have been better: it had been twelve weeks almost to the day since the first CCL surgery, the time when the vet said he could start having short runs off-leash.

So combine 12-hour to-Saskatoon-and-back-in-the-same-day drives (we have to go get him this weekend), cat elimination patrol, a looming article deadline, teaching, trying to continue with my own writing, painting walls, attempting to actually keep the house clean (ha!) and, oh yeah, this weird, painful condition called ‘frozen shoulder’ (more on that in future), a heated email exchange with my sister, the fact that my husband is taking his first grad school course while working full-time, and the generally insanity of the current world (Ebola! ISIS! Scottish independence!) and I seriously need a) a bath, b) a bath on a beach in Cuba, c) a bath on a beach in Cuba with a waiter bringing me mojitos on the quarter-hour.

And then I saw this, thanks to my creative and curious sister-in-law Amber’s Facebook feed:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo[/youtube]

I almost said: too busy, can’t watch, must scrub the toilet, must address heap of clothes on bedroom floor, must check cat-potty… but I didn’t.

I took four minutes; I took the Monday morning coffee break, and watched it, and really tried to take

it

in.

We are so tiny, with our swirling, galactic brains, our troubles miniscule clusters of self-enforced chaos that actually, in the long, long run, in the wide, wide scheme, might not really mean that much

at all.

I think I’ll go for a walk.