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Working for the Weekend

It’s more than a catchy song title to me

Text and photo by Tom Hintz

Posted – 6-18-2015

It worked well in a song title and lots of folks use it to describe and/or justify their feelings about their jobs. However, now saddled with the limitations of Alzheimer's along with having one car in the family “working for the weekend” has become a mantra of sorts for me. Much of the work I do on my sites during the week directly relates to what I did last weekend or what I want to accomplish this coming weekend. But there is a difference between the first part of the week and the last part.
Mondays I am usually fresh off a weekend of flying and hanging around with my friends at the flying field. I really do like creating content for my sites so I start each week looking forward to that process. Usually there is lots of video footage to edit and that is enjoyable to me though it takes longer these days because I have to go back and forth more often than before because I forgot things the first time around.

Most weeks by Wednesday my attitude is slowing down as I try to deal with the video I forgot to shoot or information I forgot to add to content done earlier in the week. Still, I can fix most of this, it just takes more time than it used to. I didn’t worry about the extra time earlier in the Alzheimer's journey telling myself that even wasted effort was still exercise for my brain and that is what all of this is about at its core.

It is also around the middle of the week when frustration sets in over wasting some of the time I have left on fixing memory-based errors from earlier in the week. That frustration is magnified by knowing that a steady flow of content is what will grow my sites and the financial impact they can have on my family when I am no longer able to work or gone altogether. Not having a sufficient budget complicates this because there is precious little of any consequence that can be done for free, even on the Internet.
By Thursday or Friday depression is settling in because I have all day to think about what I can’t get out to do. I try to keep busy with the sites but by this part of the week content generation is usually stalled because I need the supportive video that can only come from the flying field and not being able to go get it piles on the frustration.
People have a very hard time understanding something as foreign as not being able to just go someplace when needed. Some even think I “have it made” by not having to go anywhere all week. It has to be very difficult to understand how frustrating this can be when they have not experienced it themselves. Not having a second car makes good financial sense for us now and I understand that. However that does little to reduce the frustrations Alzheimer's imposes on my daily life.

So, “working for the weekend” has more meaning to me than it might to most people. It creates the emotional rollercoaster I ride each week. The scary part is that the peaks and valleys of that ride are getting more pronounced. I love the highs of flying and being at the flying field but the valleys of frustration between those trips are increasingly hard to deal with. I don’t know what to blame that on except the progression of Alzheimer's. I feel that I am working my brain harder than most people in my situation but that is getting harder and harder to do in part because of the lack of time and budget to do it with.

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