Hello. My name is Mel and this week I am overwhelmed.

There is a lot going on right now. And I totally hid from some of it that I probably could’ve gotten a jump on during the last few weeks of my last tour.

That was unwise.

I am excellent at hiding from things sometimes though.

But here we are.

I mean, I thought it would be easy to sort out how to get a mortgage and just go buy a house, but it is not proving to be particularly easy.

I’ve now got 7 days before I have to move somewhere new, so I’m trying to figure out where to live and what to do about that.

I hate the idea of paying any rent if I’m just planning to buy a house, but here we are.

I also got a phone call today from the job I just got that they couldn’t get me approved at the level they thought they could, so surprise, with a week till the job starts and me not having any other jobs lined up, they had to reoffer me the job with a $13,000 pay cut.

Yeah, $13,000 pay cut. How shady is that? For a job that isn’t supposed to be the shady type anymore.

Which I am, of course, going to take, because what the heck else am I going to do for the next five months otherwise? But it’s definitely put me in a this very well may only be a one time job thing mood rather than a maybe this will be the thing I do now mood.

Which, to be fair, I only needed the tiniest bump to slide to that side of thinking, since I was already panicking about settling down anyway.

Additionally, I just got the syllabi for the courses I’m supposed to teach and am now speed reading textbooks to be able to teach two of these subjects starting in a week. It is a combination of totally ridiculous and also – hey, maybe am qualified to do this, because I can speed read a textbook and make sense of it. But knocking back 200 pages a day of theater textbooks isn’t exactly fun, as I annotate them and try to make notes about activities and related things we can do on each subject. I feel like my brain is in a blender.

For what it’s worth, I am not a procrastinator usually. When I was a student, I was like a super plan ahead, write your papers weeks before due dates, no stress type. This is kind of stressful.

I also calculated that for each class I have to have approximately 43 hours of material to teach and I almost curled back up in a fetal position and started rocking.

But hey, this’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. Or it will be a disaster. And I will live in a cardboard box in the woods somewhere.

Or. Right. So. This was a post on what to do when you’re feeling overwhelmed.

Sigh.

So here’s what I’ve done.

I took the number of pages I need to read before next Tuesday and divided them by 6 and I’ve been reading them every freaking day.

I set a goal day for each class (one on Wednesday, one on Sunday, one on Monday) to revise each syllabus and try to map out the first week of study guides.

I actually contacted two different mortgage companies to see what’s up with my ability to maybe get a mortgage with them.

I made a super backup plan where I can AirBnB for a month or two near the school I’m teaching at. It’s not the most frugal option, but not cripplingly bad. I can also slightly hack the cost using prepurchased gift cards from Raise and eBates (I mean, Rakuten – whatever the heck the rebate portal is called now).

And I contacted two apartment places down by the school to see if they offer 6 month rentals instead of a full year. One of them is a trailer home. I’m a little excited about it.

I’m dealing with my overwhelmed-ness by making a list and slowly hacking away at it. I’m trying to be disciplined enough to hit each goal and every goal except that last syllabus on Monday has some (really small) wiggle room if I fall behind.

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed?