It’s been a hundred days

…since the start of my second try at getting my house all cleaned up. How’m I doing? Have I drained my own personal swamp? Is the place immaculate and empty?

Well, no. It’s cleaner than it was, and less cluttered, but there’s a lot left to do. And it’s really nobody’s fault. I’m overcommitted, and that’s part of the problem – but nobody could have predicted, more than three months ago, that I would be still be filling in for our church treasurer, let alone that my father-in-law’s health would take a nosedive.

So what do you do when you have too many things to do, and can’t walk away from the ones that eat up the largest amount of time? You make lots of lists so you don’t forget two-thirds of the things that HAVE TO get done today, and you reluctantly let some things slide that you’d like to do, and you take one step forward after another and try not to trip over your own feet.

And you cook a very simple Thanksgiving dinner, today. Never mind making Thanksgiving “interesting” – we’ll be eating roast turkey, with sweet potatoes, cranberries, salad, and pumpkin pie; just the basics, thank you.

I suppose it’s a good thing that I’m more of natural marathoner than a sprinter. I will have a clean house with no unloved junk in it – but probably not in 2015.

The clock is ticking…

…only fourteen and a half hours left of 2012. Sorry, fourteen and a quarter.

All right, let’s try for realistic plans for 2013. One thing I’ve finally learned over the past year (and about time, too) is that there’s a limited number of minutes in a day to get things done, and a limited amount of mental and emotional and physical energy to use for doing them. So it seems like a good idea to tackle only one large new goal at a time.

The two things that have to continue are writing and providing support for my mom. I’ll certainly continue with the weekly 100-word challenges – they’re fun, they’re good practice, and I enjoy seeing what other people come up with based on the same prompts. I’ll go on blogging regularly. And, above all, I’ll keep chipping away at the boulder of book-length fiction, trying to sculpt it into finished work of my own.

What should I tuck into the corners of the day around that central core? Probably the thing I want to do least: clean the horrible house, because the inconvenience and irritation of living in this mess is getting to me. And what that needs to start with is getting rid of lots and lots and lots of stuff – we own too many things to organize them all.

Once the mess is under control, I can free up time for regular exercise, something I’ve neglected lately. And make sure I’m eating good food, not junk. Will I lose weight? Probably not, but I’ll be healthier.

And, since at least one New Year’s resolution should focus on something you want to do, I’m going to finally make time for knitting experiments – trying out odd stitches and construction methods that I’ve read about here and there. Blog posts, yes, there will be blog posts. With pictures.

(And also, I’ll go on looking forward to posts from the many varied bloggers I follow. Some of you have become online friends, and all of you brighten my day. Thank you so much!)

Hello, blogreading subset of the world!

That’s right, it’s another blog.

And what’s this one intended to focus on? Well, focus is a word I’ve always had trouble with. It’s just not easy to focus when both your eyes are nearsighted, but one’s only a little short of the standard while the other one can’t see anything more than a palm’s length away clearly. So when my glasses are off, nothing is ever perfectly clear, unless I bring it to within half an inch of my more nearsighted eye, and that doesn’t work for things that are very big or very dangerous or very far away, which covers a lot of the universe.

Anyway, this is intended to be a blog mostly about the process of fiction writing, and reading.  Also, it’s a way to discipline myself to write something Every. Blessed. Day. no matter how much else is going on. But expect digressions.

Starting here. It’s more or less spring here in New Jersey…cold and wet and cloudy and raw, but getting greener by the day. These plants are in a hurry. They put up with hunkering down and enduring, like the rest of us, through half of December and then January and then February and probably about sixteen weeks of March, and they’ve had enough. Consider my tulips. Every year they send up flower buds that have every intention of being thoroughly tuliplike. The flower stalks get taller and taller and the buds get bigger and bigger and start to separate into petals – and then the squirrels eat them. Every year.

Anyhow, this year one tulip was clearly fed up. It wasn’t waiting for anybody. It wasn’t even waiting to push a couple of dead leaves aside when it grew up to the surface again. Nope. It just grew right through them and carried the leaves – willow oak, maple, pin oak – along.

Don’t mess with tulips, okay?