What could be more Simple? Here’s today’s list:

• Put Christmas decorations away
• Do dishes
• Pay bills
• Scan Grandma’s bill so they can be submitted to DSHS
• Take her walker/wheelchair to the nursing home
• Order her knee brace
• Take my son in to fund his IRA
• Get his tax forms and documents together
• Clean the bathroom
• Cook dinner
• Buy gifts for the nursing home staff
• Put vacation pictures on a thumb drive for my dad

The tasks are simple. No individual item on my to-do list is complicated. However, getting through the list always is. Many tasks have little features or factors that make just doing it tricky.

For example: I need to scan my grandmother’s medical bills into pdf files so that they can be submitted. But my son is asleep in the room where I keep the scanner. He’s still on Beijing time. I’m not quite off of Buenos Aires time, so our blocks of being conscious and cogent aren’t lining up too well, a little twist to many simple tasks.

Then there is managing the list, just the number of simple tasks is a bit daunting so I try to figure out how to batch things up. Every “I need….” from Grandma is a minimum of an hour of travel time, longer in rush hour so you have to keep a tight eye on the clock, plus budget time looking for parking and sometimes a significant walk in to the facility. If I have any errand that is between here and there I try to insert it into the same trip…but lately that hasn’t worked so well.

I call it “the frazzle factor”, and it’s become a major roadblock. We had to go out to dinner the other night because I was so frazzled from a trip to the nursing home that I didn’t stop for food. I just couldn’t face finding parking again, a crowded grocery store and making a decision about what to fix for dinner.

How can I feel so worn out when I just got back from vacation?