I am stressed out.

I won’t go into how much gray hair I have acquired and how much sleep I have lost and the stress source, but I will say that it is starting to reach TCSD proportions. No exaggeration.

One thing that TCSD taught me was that there is nothing worse than sitting around, wallowing in your own misery. That’s not to say that I haven’t been doing just that. But I got to thinking today about the ways I have tried to deal with stress, and I remembered a nifty little stress-buster project I had going a few months ago that I have since dropped due to lack of time.

It starts out with one of these:

One multiplies into many and soon you have enough to group into sets of 5. A little dab of glue here and there, and you get these:

Ooh la la! But wait! There’s more! A little more glue and patience and you get this!

Now, if you weren’t like me and didn’t stuff this haphazardly into a cardboard box when you were moving into your new apartment, it might not look so ragged. But I kind of think the crinkly edges give it a little bit of, as the French say, I don’t know what. Yeah, that’s what I’ll keep telling myself.

For those who don’t believe that it didn’t look halfway decent before it got busted up, here’s a before picture:

Perhaps it is time I step away from the computer monitor (ha!), and administer some stress relief in the form of origami. Fold fold fold, glue glue glue. Therapeutic! The next time I post here, I hope to be out of this rut. And if I’m surrounded by about a thousand of these between now and then, then so be it.