I have to say that my stress levels are not great tonight. Due to a variety of factors good (my mother is visiting) and bad (we are renegotiating Phoebe’s terms of sleep), my time and concentration have been reduced to critically low levels.
Please note that it is almost 1:00 a.m., and that rather than going to sleep I have chosen to: a) spend time writing, re-writing, re-re-writing (etc.) this largely incoherent rant due to stress-induced cognitive deficits and b) use a picture for which I had to 1) go on a scavenger hunt around the living room to locate a set of rings 2) set up said rings for a photo 3) upload pictures to my laptop 4) determine what application to use to put an arrow on a picture and 5) look up appropriate image-spacing html tags. And I wonder where my time goes.
collecting tokens 
i love that you set up the said rings for the photo.
i so totally do.
jen-
Thank you! I love it that you love it. That makes it feel more worthwhile.
I’d also like to share that the act of including this photo in my post helped to reduce my stress levels. I would say that I am now down to the yellow level. Which was an unanticipated benefit. (Sadly, it has also reduced my sleep levels, a predicted drawback.)
It was all to good effect (affect?).. I laughed at the picture! (laughing with you, not at, of course..). I think the homeland security types should use this graphic in the future.
I need someone to help me renegotiate my terms of sleep. Any suggestions?
Okay, I would have SO done that myself. At 1:00am. This is what I’m talking about. And needless to say, I love the picture.
(I am that yellow end of pole sticking out in the middle. They don’t even make a ring my size at this level of stress and sleep deficit)
bs-
Glad you liked the graphic. As far as the sleep renegotiation, would you like a plan that involves screaming and hair-pullling? That’s mostly the kind I know.
KC-
It’s nice to know that I am not alone in my particular strain of madness.
As far as your level of stress and sleep deficit, I think I have a solution: we’ll propose to Fisher Price that they manufacture a set of rings that better reflects the higher-end extremes of stress. Since I’m not sure what molded plastic color would be redder than red, I’m thinking maybe a ring that would burst into flames when stress levels reach the top, or at least have an alarm and flashing lights. (Though I suppose the flaming ring version would probably lead to some alarms and flashing lights.)