Do I feel better? Well, kind of . . .

It's Sunday night, 10:30. The weekend has been a mixture of the usual humdrum non-events that make up life's rich (ho hum) tapestry -- a visit to the library, a stroll round Longton and a cuppa in Tescos, playing Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, going MFI for stuff to furnish Heather's room, having the siblings down for tea (Saturday), going to Mum's for tea (tonight), a bit of reading and writing . . . all much of a muchness but it does help to wind down. It's familiar. It's comforting. Above all it's numbing. I don't feel the stress I know will inevitably arise the moment I step out of the door into pitch blackness tomorrow morning. It's like weekends put a little good cheer in the bottle and Monday mornings drain it. By Tuesday I'll probably have blundered into another lamp post or fell over a bag of plaster at work and will be truly pissed off with my lot again. It's beginning to dawn on me that the main problem is trying to work at the same speed that I always have done. This is the curse of piecework. Run around like a blue-arsed fly and thou will get a reasonable wage; slacken off just slightly and watch thy gross pay tumble. Maybe I should slow down so I don't feel like my eyes are out on stalks. I'm sure it's the effort of concentrating on where I'm putting my size 12s -- something other people can take for granted -- that makes me so tired all the time.