It feels like having a pile of rocks fall on top of me. And every time I think I've clawed my way out of the pile, something else smacks me in the middle of the back or the back of the head. I'm so used to being able to keep a little bit ahead of everything that's going on in the company, and now I find myself falling further behind every time I look up to take a breath.

This is so contrary to my slacker ways that I'm having a hard time with it. I've been this busy before, but never since I started working at home full time. I've always been able to spread the work out so it doesn't feel like such a burden. Now I'm feeling suffocated, and I don't like it.

On the other hand, how could I wish it any other way? This is the Great Leap Forward I've been hearing about for all of the sixteen years I've been with the Boss. Now (or soon, or some day) I'll learn the real value of all those promises that have been made and repeated down through the years. Am I going to be rich? Or a poor, embittered loser, cast aside and stomped on?

There have been times over the years that I felt I was destined to live in a refrigerator box under the Third Street Overpass. Sometimes I've been sure that day was just around the corner. I've been laid off a few times in those sixteen years, and it makes me queasy now remembering how it felt. When I doubt my commitment to my job, I can find motivation in those memories.

The saving grace in all this is that so many of my daily chores require only a small part of my brain. That means I can be doing two things at once and still have room left over to listen to The Band, Pete Seeger or Louis Prima. Some tasks are even so simple that I can do them while watching General Hospital. I can't work while I'm watching my telenovelas, though. The language thing.

I tried to put the new flat garden hose together this evening. Everything seemed to be fitting, despite my well-known surplus of thumbs, but I never figured out what to do with the two brackets and two screws. They're shown on the parts diagram, but nowhere in the assembly drawings can I find where to use them.

By the time I'd finished, it was too late to test the hose. I can't quite picture how it's going to work, because it's all rolled up with no place to unravel, unless I hold it in my hand or let it drag along the ground. Ah well, I guess it was too much to expect me to do this (a) by myself, and (2) on the first try.