I had a sore throat yesterday. It was pretty bad when I woke up, but faded to a bare irritation once I was vertical and moving around, so I guessed (hoped) that it was just allergies, and went ahead to the Y for my swim.

(I may not have mentioned that before: I joined the YMCA last week so I could go swimming, which is about the only exercise that my dysfunctional lower limbs will tolerate. I'm considering tacking the kids onto my membership so that on the weekends, I can drop Alex off in the daycare room and take Penny into the kiddie section of the pool and try to teach her how to swim. If they'd had any weekend swim lesson sessions still open, that would've clinched the deal, but they didn't. I'm sure those classes filled up back in April.)

Anyway, by the time I got home, the sore throat was getting worse again. I looked at it last night, and the back of my throat looks red and raw, but doesn't seem to have those telltale white spots that would indicate strep. So I decided I'd give it two or three more days to see what happened. If it starts getting worse (or I see those stupid white spots) I'll call the doctor. If it's not significantly better by Thursday morning, I'll call the doctor anyway, because the last three times I had strep, it pretended to be allergies for several days until a weekend arrived, and then smacked me with the pain so bad I could barely stand to breathe.

But it seems better already today, so hopefully it's just allergies, and I'll be back to normal in a few days.

I'm not entirely certain how long the swimming will last. It fits into my schedule, but it does so tightly -- last night, I left work and went straight to the Y, changed clothes and swam for just a smidge over 20 minutes, then showered and changed and went straight home. Matt and the kids had just gotten home; I went straight into the kitchen and started working on bottles and lunches and dinner and I didn't sit down at all until dinner was served, and then I got right back up and had to clean up the dinner dishes and finish making lunches. (I'm afraid I got a little snippy at Matt about it. It's not that he doesn't help out, but after dinner he wanders into the living room to watch TV or get on the computer unless I specifically give him tasks to do, and I end up clearing the table, putting away the leftovers, loading the dishwasher, washing dishes, and finishing lunches myself. Most of the time I let it go, because he also mows the lawn and does at least 90% of the laundry and changes the cat litter and takes out the trash, but sometimes I feel a little grumpy about it. Maybe we should sit down and make a chore chart for the whole house so I have something to look at to remind myself that however put-upon I feel, things are actually pretty evenly divided.)

Ahem. Pardon the aside. It's possible that I have some Issues.

Where was I going with all that...? Oh, yes. The swimming. I don't know if it will last too long, but I'm resolved to give it at least a month. And I'm going to attempt one or two lunchtime classes at the yoga studio where I took my prenatal yoga classes, but that might have to wait for my knee to heal, since I'm not supposed to do any squatting or other positions that put stress on the knee.

And even if all this goes perfectly, I'll have to figure out something else come September, when Penny starts school and our schedules rearrange.

I've been obsessed with my schedule lately. I can't seem to stop it -- I'm drawing charts, shading in appointments and trying to calculate how long various activities take. I do it over and over. I'm not sure why. Am I trying to figure out how to optimize my day so I can squeeze in something else? Or am I just trying to rationalize my whining?