Best laid plans

I got to work on POS, yesterday, and managed to put down 1300 words before my mother began her little ritual of distraction. "When you have a moment, could you...?" "I hate to bother you but..." "Don't we need to...?" I finally saved what I had, closed my laptop and spent the afternoon dealing with her issues.

1. We needed a copy of bloodwork she had done concerning kidney functions for an appointment she has with a specialist, tomorrow. No big deal; don't even need to see the doctor at the clinic mom goes to. Just go to the records department and have them make a copy -- and that's exactly what happened. Took a total of 20 minutes. But --

2. Since we were right by North Star Mall, she wanted to drop off her glasses to see if they could fix a scratch on the lens. That segued into getting all new glasses with transitional lenses. There goes an hour. Then --

3. She'd like to get some more yogurt and needs some milk, so we go to the grocery store. And go up and down aisles and fill a cart with groceries. Hour and a half.

Once everything was settled and mom was fed and Kelly was home, it was 7pm. I still managed to add another 1200 words...

No...I need to stop looking at this as word count. Because the fact is, half of what I did yesterday was lay out Brendan's life in the chapter dealing with the time between the trip to Grianan Aileach circle fort and Operation Motorman. It's more like a step outline done up in okay prose than a real bit of storytelling, but I'm settling in what goes where and what I need to know to make this work...and I'm only just up to the point that leads into what I'd worked out the night before. But it does include a nice little quality time between Brendan and Joanna in St. Columb's Park where he talks her into considering attending Trinity College in Dublin then works out a way for them to go down and check the place out, without her parents' knowledge. And tells her he'll follow her. And he's just 15 still, as is she.

Right now I'm a bit bleh. My table is a mess of things I've put aside and need to be addressed. Guess I'll start on those and use that to kick-start my brain. Let's see how far I get, today, before I'm dragged away from it. And yes, I know -- it's my own damn fault for letting myself be dragged instead of telling mom to leave me alone...but I want her to keep this momentum going on her health care and if someone doesn't push for her, she'll just stop dealing with things. As it is, I've only got her to where she's being checked for about 2/3 of her problems. She still has teeth and physical therapy and leg and foot cramps...and it's pathetic I'm talking about her problems as if they were mine. But that's how it feels, sometimes.