Sunday Blues

[palesa]

As most you know, I have been having a tough time at work, and job hunting is not going well. The result?

Sunday afternoon blues. Time for the knot in the tummy to make itself comfortable.

Do you suffer from SAB and how do you deal with it?

[ninchursanga]

A bit of sunday blues here, too. Today I realised I have only 3 weeks left until I move and it does make me feel sad a bit. The weather is cold, rainy and grim, too.
Usually I asign myself a blue day and tomorrow just move on.

[Deleted]

I hate Sunday, the day before Monday!

So I take Monday off as often as possible, while most of my colleagues like to take Fridays off.

I thought you had a job at home (and out in those social work places), palesa.

[palesa]

I do have a home office, but I still have colleagues, who do not do their job properly.

However, their contracts will not be renewed at the end of February and I have the joyous task of travelling to Durban to close down the office.

THings are very tense because my contract has been renewed and theirs has not.

[ninchursanga]

Ouch, that doesn't sound like a pleasant task then.

[Deleted]

This is the reason I became a hoticulturist. The plants don't know what day of the week it is.

[spindrift]

Oh, how interesting. You are a horticulturist! Please tell us something about your work.

[Deleted]

I tend other people's gardens. Here we garden with machetes so the goal is to not let things get too out of control. I have about 6 regular clients,mostly older women or professionals who don't have time to their gardens but profess to be gardeners(and therefore take credit for my work). I generally do weekly maintenance,depending on the time of year and weather conditions of course. I do a fair amount of design work although technically am not liscenced to do so, as long as I keep a low profile about it no one really cares. I like all the people I work for because if I didn't I wouldn't work for them. I made this decision many,many years ago. I pass them on to someone else and other gardeners pass people on to me. There are enough gardens and gardeners in NOLA to be able to do this fairly comfortably.

[happytraveller]

Funny, I was close to make a SAB-Post yesterday too but I didn't have the energy to turn the computer back on.

[Deleted]

...the rustle of the kudzu, creeping towards the house in the night.

[bixaorellana]

Yeek, Kerouac!!! Do you have my phone tapped? Earlier this evening I was talking on the phone and Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins" came up. It's been years since I read the book, but I distinctly remember the kudzu.

[palesa]

OH mY G*D! Kerouac is Google, he can read minds!

[welle]

kudzu, now that stuff is just weird. I saw it in Atlanta a lot. Creepy.

[Deleted]

Curiously,we don't have much of a problem with Kudzu here contrary to popular belief(Georgia,Alabama et al another story).
Cat's claw(Bignonia tweediana) is what will end up taking over our fair city. I will treat this in another post with pics once I gain some confidence with my new camera.
I probably should not have said that about kuzu,watch me show up at a new garden I'm scoping out today and find the place smothered in it.

[Deleted]

I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that research found that kudzu had some medicinal properties relating to the treatment of ETOHism. Will look more into this.

[Deleted]

I spent a lot of my childhood chopping back kudzu that was reaching out of the wood lot next door to our yard.

More about kudzu:

Kudzu was introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant. From 1935 to the early 1950s the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the Southeastern United States to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion as above, and the Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years.

However, it was subsequently discovered that the Southeastern US has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control — hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, temperate winters with few hard freezes (kudzu cannot tolerate low freezing temperatures that bring the frost line down through its entire root system, a rare occurrence in this region), and no natural predators. As such, the once-promoted plant was named a pest weed by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953.

Infestation of Kudzu in the United States.Kudzu is now common throughout most of the Southeastern United States, and has been found as far northeast as Paterson, New Jersey, in 30 Illinois counties including as far north as Evanston, and as far south as Key West, Florida. It has also been found growing (rather inexplicably) in Clackamas County, Oregon in 2000. Kudzu has naturalized into about 20,000 to 30,000 square kilometers (7,700–12,000 sq mi) of land in the United States and costs around $500 million annually in lost cropland and control costs.

[bixaorellana]

Kudzu can be eaten -- I'd have to look it up, but I think both the leaves and root are used in Japan and probably other places.

It seems to prefer rural areas. In my hometown, which has huge hollows, it covers entire banks of earth. It's a legume, & has quite pretty flowers, like very large sweet peas.

[bixaorellana]

Feb 8, 2009 15:08:03 GMT palesa said:

Sunday afternoon blues. ...

Do you suffer from SAB and how do you deal with it?

If ever a thread drifted off target, it was this one!

I think that Sunday feeling can affect anyone. I used to feel it when I was a kid, long before I went to work. Also, now that I'm retired I can still be prone to that strange sense of time stopping on a Sunday, which can make the prettiest day feel Twilight Zone-ish and depressing.

[Deleted]

I think that once I stop working, Sunday blues will be a thing of the past. However, it's true that it is hard to ignore everybody else talking about it.

[onlymark]

Living in an Arabic country the working week is shifted around a bit and the weekend days swapped around as well. So I don't suffer from Sunday blues but Saturday ones.
Friday is treated actually like a Sunday and Saturday is like a normal Saturday with shopping and stuff.

[Deleted]

I saw that a number of Islamic countries have changed their weekend to Friday-Saturday rather than Thursday-Friday to be able to interact better with international businesses elsewhere. Algeria can't make up its mind because it swtiched from Saturday-Sunday to Thursday-Friday in 1976 and then it switched to Friday-Saturday last year.

It must be weird to live in a country that changes its weekend. There are so many little details of life affected by such things.

[palesa]

Now that I am not working, I think I still suffer from SAB, but for different reasons now.

[bixaorellana]

Of the last three people to respond to this thread, only one (Kerouac) works the western world's conventional Monday through Friday. OnlyMark, do you work a five-day week, and if not, are the rest of your family bound to it because of jobs or school? And Palesa, since your life changed a year ago with the loss of your husband, would you still phrase this as "Sunday afternoon blues", as you did in the body of the OP, or would you say the whole day has a certain melancholy?

I'm asking because as I said above in #17, there is something about the feel of a Sunday -- the whole day -- that seems to provoke a sort of glumness.

[onlymark]

There is a five day week here, Sunday to Thursday. Everyone works the same, schools, banks etc. My work can be done on any day as it is generally from home or with tourists (but not often now) who don't recognise the days of the week. I don't work more than I do work.

[palesa]

Actually Bix, yes, I think that Sunday generally has a melancholic feel about it.

I could change the title of my OP to Glum Sun(day)

[auntieannie]

I used to love Mondays, love working,... now, that I have been through a few years of not liking my job, I have found that meeting friends on a Sunday afternoon is ideal to wave the feeling away.
I meet my friends from "Stitch & Bitch" for knitting in the evening, and often use the earlier hours of that dreaded day to preserve food.
Concentrating on a pleasant activity does wonders for one's mind.

[hwinpp]

I've no particular feeling towards Sundays, good or bad. I have noticed I'm going out more on Sunday evenings than Saturday evenings though. Don't know why.

[bixaorellana]

Hee hee, Palesa. No need to change the OP. I am grateful that someone here understands my Sunday feeling, though.

[bixaorellana]

I am reading Paul Theroux's Night Train to the Eastern Star. He describes that Sunday feeling very well:

           It was Sunday, and a hot bright somnolence, with a hint of sadness, descended on Bangkok, reminding me of the opression of empty Sundays when I was very young.

[tillystar]

Oh those empty Sundays as a kid when everything was closed and there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.

I love Sundays, but get the Sunday night blues terribly. The only way to stop them is to prepare for Monday in the morning and then keep the Sunday day going for as long as possible