Linda’s prompt this week is “ex”, and it’s hard to read that and not think about the ways I’m coming up short of late. For the past couple of weeks, I’m an ex-every-day-writer, an ex-dedicated-to-working-out-workout-doer, and an ex-regular-blogger.

It’s hard to lay all the blame on one thing, but I’m gonna go ahead and lay much of it on the new job. I anticipated it would be stressful; I didn’t anticipate that it would leave me totally drained at the end of every day, with very little semblance of my old work/workout/write routine.

And the sad fact is, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, because starting very soon, I’ll be pulling some serious after-school hours, which is only going to exacerbate the problem. There is, in short, no exit.

Not to fear. You’re not off the hook so easily, dear reader. Only a matter of time until I figure out how to make it all work, and I’ve already mostly figured out how to get my daily novel writing in (3000+ words this week — good ones, too).

In the meantime, here are some things that might have merited full blog posts, were I not struggling to move myself from the couch when I’m not at work this week:

Rio crowds heckling Hope Solo by booing her every time she touches the ball, and shouting “ZIKA” on every one of her kickoffs. Solo is hardly the most likable personality on the team, and she’s obviously got some off-the-field issues, but she’s not the kind of player that’s going to buckle to, or even be impressed by, a little bit of hate. The whole thing just kind of makes me laugh — and I imagine that she pictures a deadly cloud of mosquitoes ferrying the ball to midfield every time she hears the odd cry.

Speaking of the Olympics, I hardly watched the opening ceremonies at all — the only thing we caught was a demonstration with a Brazilian prototype airplane that was … I dunno … it started in reality on the field and then turned into this weird greenscreen thing on the broadcast? Between that and the strange box-stacking thing that started it all off, I just couldn’t get into it — and things weren’t helped by the fact that NBC was cutting to commercial every five minutes. I should hardly be pooping on the presentation designed to highlight the spirit of the host country and the camaraderie of the games, but the opening ceremonies are always so odd.

Still, the scenery is absolutely breathtaking — the shots of the mountains overlooking the bay are just staggeringly beautiful, if you can forget about the fact that the water would fail a breathalyzer test if breathalyzers could test for poop.

Then again, it’s hard to forget about all the poop in that water, or the fact that those swimming in the bay were advised “not to open their mouths” while swimming.

And on one final, unrelated note, the new job gives me a somewhat longer commute, which is giving me the time to catch up on some podcasts that I neglected over the summer. I’ve caught up on all kinds of fascinating minutiae. Granny-style free-throw shooting. Supreme Court justice shenanigans. Black hole collisions and gravitational waves (not “gravity waves,” there’s a difference, it turns out). And the ins and outs of shooting a Youtube show as a woman (never read the comments, apparently).

Oh, and Donald Trump is crazier every day; cracking like an overripe egg under the heat lamp of the election spotlight.

I can’t wait for self-driving cars to become a thing, so that I can actually get some work done when I’m driving back and forth to work.

More blargs this week. The universe depends on it.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.