I have recently started using a notebook to keep track of a lot of the little “do every day” kind of tasks in my life.
And no, you’re not expected to make sense of it. The notes are for me. Keeping track of stuff I’m doing in my calendar app or my Scrivener goals list doesn’t work so well as I have to open my computer to take notes. In evenings and on the weekend I try to stay off the computer and it’s often upstairs and out of the way. Good for relaxing, less for tracking.
While this has worked well as a spur to keep me going on my exercise regimen, giving my throat a steam bath every day (didn’t happen this month, but I came the closest I have in a while) and doing my stretching and yoga, I haven’t been on top of my writing in October. Finishing Southern Discomfort took longer than anticipated; work for The Local Reporter frequently takes extra time; and as usual, working on a movie book takes a lot of time (it will pay off down the road when I’m not rushing though) and I still didn’t get as far as I wanted. Lots of little things — article queries, short story submissions — fall by the wayside. I will carve out specific time slots for the little but necessary stuff this month and see if that helps.
This week I got next to nothing done. TYG was off for the whole week so Tuesday she offered to sit with the dogs all day so I could have a day free of dog-sitting. Monday, however, we went in to vote around 8:30 AM and then went out to lunch a couple of hours later. Even though the voting was quick — someone tipped us off to a polling station with no lines — that chopped up the morning enough I figured, hey, I’d take Monday off as well.
Tuesday turned out not to be my dog-free day. Indeed, if I’d been planning to work, I probably wouldn’t have gotten any done. Both our pups have been biting on their feet which is a sign they need cytopoint anti-allergy shots. And hey, there were a couple of other issues we could ask about — which meant that instead of a vet tech giving them a shot, we needed a doctor, which wound up being two appointments separated by a couple of hours. TYG took one of them in, I stayed home with the other.
When she took Plushie in, it turned out his glaucoma eye pressure was horribly high. TYG had to rush him out to our animal eye doctor half an hour away (the nearby location doesn’t have a doctor on Tuesday’s). Turns out his eye pressure was perfectly normal. Which is a YAY moment but we’re not happy with our regular vet (they did the test multiple times with TYG watching so god knows what the problem is). And of course that took a chunk of time out of our day. Then Trixie went in, which was quick but expensive: she had a massive diarrhea bout the night before (I slept through it on Ambien), way worse than usual. The vet did a lot of checking but nothing seriously wrong turned up. Which is good but frustrating. Though by the end of the day she was back to normal.
The end result was that I got in a bike ride but nothing I’d planned beyond that. However it was a beautiful day for an hour bicycle ride so there’s that. I cannot seem to recover my ability to cycle uphill though.
Wednesday I’d thought I might get back to work and I did. However it was a request from The Local Reporter to do a story on a 102-year-old woman voting early for the first time. I’d planned to skip doing a story this week as I had so little time but I couldn’t say no, so … Anyway, after that I settled for wrapping up odds and ends such as doing some research reading.
It didn’t help that I’d been hit by a hacking cough last weekend, the kind that with me usually becomes an infection. Aggressive early treatment with cough syrup and throat pastilles stopped it from getting that bad, so yay!
And I got in a couple of Atomic Junk Shop posts, one on a couple of extremely sexist stories, one on DC’s House of Mystery in the late 1960s being a place that has actual boarders renting rooms.
Even weirder, one of them is DC artist Gil Kane.
Despite the disruptions, having almost a whole week off wasn’t too bad — it’s something I haven’t done in forever. Hopefully I’ll be full of vim and vigor come Monday.
#SFWApro. Art by Kane, all rights to image remain with current holder.
