Goal 85 - Have a date with Scott once a month

I'm off and running on this one, anyway! Dinner and a movie last Friday. We saw The Dark Knight which was scary but interesting. And loud.

This is a picture of my ScottieDog, taken at dinner. Just to prove we were there! (He's actually handsomer than in this photo.)

(This goal is going to be fun.)

This Week

I'm off to the Bard Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson for the week. I'll be posting from there. It's a beautiful place, so maybe I can get some good pictures to post. Hope I don't slack off my goals too much!

Goal 2 -- Draw 10 Pictures

I drew a picture!!


(I wonder why I can still draw okay but can't write cursive very well at all.)

Goal 57 -- Get Right Hand Back into Shape

Poor little hand.

I saw the new surgeon this morning. ScottieDog (husband) went with me for moral support and also because he doesn't trust me to stand up for myself. (humph)

I like the doctor a lot, and we scheduled the operation for September the 23rd. A month and a half of pain-free two-handedness is ahead of me, so I have to really whack away at some of these goals. I'm trying to save the easy ones, liking drinking pomegranate juice, for when I'm laid up.

I should explain that the bone of my pinkie will be sawed through and the finger turned around the right way and pins put in. (Yes, I know it doesn't look crooked in the photo, but it wasn't crooked then, only broken. It got turned around wrong in the first surgery. Which is why I now have a new surgeon.) I will be in a cast for four weeks. If you've never had your dominant hand restrained for any length of time, you have no idea how claustrophobic it is. You can't do ANYTHING.

"Back into shape" is going to be kind of a moving target, because the hand won't ever be the same as before the accident. What I'm hoping for is reasonable flexibility so that I can play octave chords on the piano again. I will consider that "in shape."

The Care and Feeding of Habits: Goals 80 & 81

80. Develop 5 virtuous habits

Five habits may be way ambitious. Whatever, the one I’m currently working on (and to understand why this is a virtuous habit you may have to be a Southern Belle) is to get all my makeup on before I leave the house.

All my life, up until I moved to the NYC area, I have never left the house without being as ready as I was going to be for where I was going. I’ve always had an aversion even to applying lipstick and powder in public.

I do think it’s a little odd to haul out your lipstick at a restaurant table and swab some on. For one thing, I don’t like putting on lipstick unless I’ve brushed my teeth. (I know, I sound OCD, but I’m really not.) For another, I have narrow lips and a not-very-defined lipline, so if I were to apply lipstick blind like that, I’d run the risk of looking like a crazy person afterwards. Putting on lipstick is a complicated matter for me, requiring liner pencil, up to two tubes of lip color, and, of course, a mirror. I’d sure hate to haul all that out in front of God and everybody at a dinner-date. It requires a trip to the powder room.

However, one’s standards tend to relax in the face of New York City's challenges. Time is at a premium here; that’s why everybody looks so stressed and why tourists get dirty looks on the sidewalk. It takes me an hour and fifteen minutes to get to my day job. One way. (Longer if tourists are ambling along four abreast and I have to jump off into the gutter to go around, risking life and limb.) Fifteen minutes that I don’t have to spend making up before I leave the house is fifteen more minutes of sleep.

I have to confess that I once found myself flagging down a bus with my mascara wand. Lately, though, I’ve been confining my cosmetic sessions to the rear of the bus—my concession to Southern Belle propriety. It doesn’t do much for my execution, though. Those buses are not smooth rides.

(I didn’t do so well today—but I did get foundation and eyeshadow on at home. I had to be at work early.)

Okay, it probably is not that virtuous a habit, but I think I need to start small.

81. Get rid of one bad habit.

I had a hard time thinking of bad habits that I hadn’t already covered with the positive goals—like overdoing the Chardonnay—but eventually I settled on not leaving my shoes all over the house. This is actually a good habit for me to break, because I have been really accident-prone the last year or so, and I need to Melissa-proof the house. Stumbling over shoes all the time I do NOT need. Also do not need to be wasting time looking for the pair of shoes I want.

So I forgot one time this week and left my bum-around shoes in front of the couch, but I’m still motivated.

Goal 14--Home Inventory

Well hey!

I set up a database for my inventory. That was the easy part. I expect it's going to take all of 1001 days to get it complete, though. I'm planning on doing data entry from purchase receipts as I go through all the paper filing. But I have a lot of stuff that we just acquired somehow, in some instances out of the trash (my husband is a dumpster diver--but only because our high-rise has really high quality trash, like working computers and big solid cherry entertainment centers) and trying to figure out how much all this stuff is worth is a huge pain in the neck.

When I get it all entered in, a report will give us the current value of everything, and I suppose our complete net worth calculation will have to wait on that...

Goal 31--Get All Papers Filed

Aargh! This isn't even all of it. The dining room table is stacked full too.  And there are about seven or eight boxes of stuff under the table.  Two huge moving boxes of files belong to my mother-in-law who just moved up here in March into an assisted living facility.  I haven't even opened those yet.

How did I get into this mess?

One thing is that I am simply not used to non-academia.  All my life the prevailing rhythm has been nine months of school and/or work, 3 months off to do whatever, year in and year out.  

This business of working every week of the year, with just a few exceptions, has really cramped my style.  I always so looked forward to the end of spring release, when I had a chance to breathe and to get things under control.

I'm now looking at about seven years accumulation.  I quit teaching full-time in the mid-90s but began a full-time work week on the Regular People's Schedule around 1999.  I didn't do so badly keeping things under control until 2001, when 9/11 sort of put us all into a six-month paralysis.  It's been gradually downhill from there.  

Anybody else miss school??

I've been doing pretty well on Goal 31.  It looked worse than this a week ago.  I had a brainwave:  I figured I would take a stack of papers to work in my backpack, and if I had downtime I would sort through.  Best idea I ever had!  I have loaded up my day job waste basket with so much trash.  I brought home a big envelope full of things to be shredded, which I did today.  Other than getting a bad stiff neck from trying to carry too much stuff, things are progressing pretty well.  I filed for two hours this afternoon.  I can't believe it doesn't look any better than this.

(I'm also working on Goals 16 and 57.)