Radio silence and snapshots of my life

I have had no energy. The thought of doing anything above and beyond what I absolutely feel I must has made me want to turn into a giant whiny baby. Part of this is because I've had so much which came to fruition in the past week or so (Symphony concert, both of our birthdays) and part of it is because I got the stomach flu last week. (Yes, Hannah, it really was the stomach flu.) Side note: don't decide to clean out your cat's litter box when you have the stomach flu. Telling yourself, "Oh, well, I'm home and I have the time so I should take care of that..." is a bad idea. Talk yourself out of it.
A little bit of my malaise, I'm sure, is also because I'm just flat-out feeling overwhelmed and pulled in too many directions. I've barely kept up with the reading for my class, which in turn has made me feel like I've fallen down the rabbit hole. (Literary criticism. We've gotten to the point where there is no Truth. Or if there is Truth, it's all completely individual and based on our own perceptions, experiences, and knowledge of ourselves. So maybe there are many Truths? Except, we can't ever really know ourselves even because we deceive even ourselves. But looking outside to the author for Truth is even worse. The author is dead, meaningless! You must look inside for the Truth which may or may not exist and which you might or might not ever find. Just to paraphrase what I've learned so far....) The mental gymnastics involved in going through one school of literary criticism each week is fun, but also rather trying.
In addition, there's been a lot of work stress lately. Of the I totally don't want to work here anymore kind. Projects I'm working on have no real direction so my coworker and I have been alternately scolded for not doing things we were told not to do, and then scolded for doing things we were told to do. I've also had to deal with a lot of office politics bullshit, and have pretty much decided that I just hate the administrative people I have to work with. One lesson learned, however: keep all email communications, even if they don't seem important. I was yelled at for not giving someone information that I'm quite certain I sent to her--several times--but I deleted the emails which would prove me right. From now on, when I deal with certain people I'm going to save each and every email.
The fact that I have to just pisses me off.
On top of being sick, the past week or so has had moments like these:

Just as I was putting my coat on the other day to leave for work (a few minutes late already) the cat threw up at my feet.

Last night Shane and I got to have this conversation at about 9:00,
Me (in the bathroom): Crap!
Shane (in the bedroom): [mummbles something]
Me: What?
Shane: Umm, you just said 'crap' while in the bathroom. I hate to ask, but what's wrong?
Me: Oh, I just realized that I put my underwear on inside out this morning and didn't notice until right now.

Leaving for class the other night, I was packing up my bag. I'd loaded some pdfs of the reading material on my Nook and just as I was grabbing it off the desk, the dog decided that she needed to go outside. So I forgot my Nook and looked totally unprepared in class.

None of it is major, but so many little things add up. I feel like my brain is melting, or like someone is gaslighting me.
There is also stuff that I haven't wanted to put on the blog, but I will now with an explanation. We started looking into buying a house. We're not even sure if we think it would be the best decision right now, but it was something we at least wanted to look into. I didn't think it would take so much effort just to look, though. Real estate agent wouldn't even talk to us unless we got bank approval, so we had to fill out tons and tons of forms, and then we sort of scraped by with the bank. Which we realized would happen, thank you student loans, and is part of the reason we hadn't been entirely sure this would be the right decision in the first place! So...I sort of feel like we jumped through all these hoops to probably arrive at the decision that we're still not yet in a position to buy a house. Probably.
The one really, really good thing to come out of all this is that Shane and I have been talking--almost endlessly--about future plans. Well, not plans. Shane hates that word, because plans always go awry. But ideas about what we'd both like for ourselves, where we think we're headed, all of that good stuff. You know, plans. But all of it is very general, because most of it is based on things that we don't/can't know yet.
So I've kept my own sort of radio silence, not wanting to just complain constantly. We have had some awesomely fun things going on. Our birthdays were over the weekend (they're back to back) and that was fantastic. Even with all of the busy-ness with the Symphony concert and the extra rehearsals for it, it was wonderful. We went to karaoke Friday night and I strained my voice (I was still recovering from being sick after all). Saturday night we had a bunch of people over--close to 20, I think--to talk and play games. No one stayed too late (most cleared out by about 12:30) but it was a great time. Sunday we got to celebrate by ourselves. It wasn't anything big, we just went out for Thai food (gift from my parents--they sent money so we could do that!) and enjoyed each other's company.
We have so much birthday cake left in our house. Well, birthday desserts since Shane's not a huge fan of cake. But holy cow. I've eaten so much sugar in the past few days as we try to get rid of it without wasting it. I'm very much looking forward to going back to our normal good eating habits.
And back to exercising, since I didn't really do that at all when I was sick. I feel lazy.
This week is sort of my recovery week. I'm not sick anymore, thankfully, so I'm gearing up to Get Shit Done once again. Our house is super clean (great side benefit to inviting so many people over!) except for the kitchen, so I don't really have to worry about that so much. I'm going to focus on getting caught up on schoolwork, on getting myself a little ahead with my own personal projects, and spending plenty of time relaxing to gear up for next week. (Hell Week for the show--at least 3 hours of rehearsal every night starting next Sunday and culminating in the first show on Friday night.) But, I get next Friday off as a holiday!
This is sort of related, in a general looking at the bright spots way, but a friend of ours joked that if our dog had thumbs, she'd be calling 911 all the time. And it has become a running joke in our house. "There's someone on the sidewalk! They might be a potential intruder, call the cops!" "I'm cold. Someone stole all my hair. Call the cops!" "Mom's 2 minutes late coming home. She's been kidnapped, call the cops!" "Mom bumped something and said ow. She broke something, I know it, call an ambulance!" It doesn't get old, at least not to us.
So, there are bright spots to look forward to. I'm hanging onto those as hard as I can.