Well, I guess it’s a life lesson when you finally get around to cleaning off your desk only to find the jury duty notice telling you that you were supposed to be at the courthouse at 9:00 AM and it’s . . . around 12:30 PM. The thing of it is, I did remember that notice. I remembered it last week, and I found it, and I was vastly relieved to see that I didn’t have to worry about it until last night after 5:00 when I was supposed to call and see if I had to come in. It was the old “oh, I’ll remember it” thing. I have plenty of resources at my disposal to keep track of my obligations, including Google calendar and Todoist, but they don’t do me any good unless I use them. For some reason, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, I figured that I’d remember. So I had to do my best to fix the situation, e-mailing
Competence
The Joy of Tackling a Big Project
My current Big Writing Project (BWP) is the finishing up of my commentaries on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana for publication. I’ve been using the writing software Scrivener, as everybody who’s anybody says it’s magnificent. Well, I’d been finding it magnificently hard to use, to be honest. The final step in my project was the addition of images, and Scrivener just wasn’t cooperating. Until, suddenly, it was. I’m not sure what I did, but I think I had somehow created a table where I didn’t want one, and Scrivener was stubbornly following the
The Joy of Competence
If I were to tell you about all the missteps we’ve had in our very simple renovation/remodel, this would be a very long post. Something seems to go wrong at every step of the way, whether it’s a mistake we make or one that a contractor makes. But we’re soldiering on. Today we finally get a working kitchen, as the (seemingly very competent) plumber is hooking up the faucet, garbage disposal and dishwasher. The countertops came in on Monday, and even though they didn’t give us as much
Always Take the Four-Hour Horse Ride.
Here’s the second of our two wonderful guides on our wonderful horseback ride that we took last week in Ouray. (You may have wondered why the previous horseback-ride-related picture was of a cowboy and his dog, with no horses. It was such a cute shot that I couldn’t resist.)
For lack of planning ahead . . .
. . . a blessing was lost!
I call it “the horrible sinking feeling.” It occurs when I get hungry, even though my blood sugar may be perfectly normal. (I’ve checked it at times, including this morning.) I get fuzzy-headed and have this empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Sometimes I feel sleepy. This morning it happened again as I sat in the lecture of the Bible study group I attend. The teaching director is a wonderful woman who always has great insights; I enjoy and profit from her very much. But I was struggling to stay alert.
From the Sublime to the Mundane
Yesterday I took on the Big Question of free will vs. fate. Today I’m talking about cleaning out my Sonicare toothbrush. No one can accuse me of being in a rut!
Here’s the thing: The inside of the head of this appliance gets gunked up with this black stuff, toothpaste residue, and it drives me crazy. ( Yes, I do rinse out the bristles. It still happens.) So I periodically spend 10 minutes or so cleaning it out with q-tips, but at some point it’s just hopeless. Recently I replaced the head, as you’re supposed to do every three months (but who does that, really?) and I determined that I was going to keep it clean. So now, every time I use it, twice a day. I unscrew the top from the base, rinse it out inside, and shake out the water before screwing it back on. Takes about 30 seconds, tops. So far it seems to be staying clean. No more black gunk. A good illustration, once again, of the principle that it’s easier to keep up than it is to catch up. (I will spare you the description of how awful my sink stopper gets because I let hairs go down the drain instead of cleaning them out. You don’t want to know about that, believe me.)
True Desire Leads to Action
You know what got me started on this whole blogging thing? My son’s cancer experience. I knew there were lots of people who wanted to keep up with developments, and I found it very therapeutic to write it all down. So I went ahead and did it. This website had been up for months, but I hadn’t felt compelled to do much with it because I had no true focus, no true desire, just a vague idea that I needed to publicize my book. Suddenly, though, I had a real story to tell. Once I got started I realized how desirable it was to write these entries. And I kept going. To this very day.
The Future Will Become the Present
Yesterday I wrote about what was going on in our lives one year ago as we finally got a diagnosis for our son Gideon and started him on the treatment that cured his cancer. So you’d think that I’d be rejoicing at any and everything that happened this week, since nothing could be as bad as that was. Right? Right. You would think that. And yet, there I was on Tuesday, grumbling and complaining to myself about the dinner I was making for my beloved community chorale’s annual business meeting. “I wish this were over with,” I thought. I had the sensation that I often have when I’m doing something I don’t particularly want to do, feeling as if I’m being dragged along unwillingly towards the event I’m preparing for.Tool Costs
I seem to be on a tool tear, as it were. Over the past several weeks I’ve written about using Scrivener as a writing tool, my little laptop as a bill-paying tool, and habits as tools to help lend structure to my life. But . . . I’ve also emphasized that tools don’t do the work for us. So I’m dedicating this post to two non-tool-users, Woody Allen and K. Lee ScottHabits Are Just Tools!
Here’s what I want: to move along doing the grungy stuff on automatic pilot while I think great thoughts. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Suddenly, at the end of the day, I’d realize that every task had been done perfectly but that I hadn’t had to exert any effort to do them. All done through the magical power of habits and routines. We all know, though, that it ain’t never gonna happen. And guess what? it would be a shame if it did