January 1, 2007

Yesterday I was talking with raisinfish and rattled off a whole list of things that I want to accomplish during the next year. When I wound down she said “Wow, how are you going to keep track of all that?” I might have mentioned planners or organization or something, I don’t remember. The point is that last night I was totally confident in my ability to track a gazillion goals big and small. This evening I’m staring at the dolist in my planner and seeing how many things aren’t checked off and I’m beginning to wonder. Honestly, it shouldn’t be that hard. Mostly I’m trying to reinstate some good habits which have fallen by the wayside.

I don’t know what it is about the last day of vacation. Yesterday I was lamenting that vacation hadn’t been long enough. Today I am totally ready to send all of the kids back to school. I wonder if they have really been more squabblish today or if it is an observer effect inside me because I’m gearing up to send them all back. At least I got all the Christmas stuff put away.

I think I was inspired by my mom’s impressive example. She has been clearing out decades worth of accumulated junk in her house. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see the full effect at her house because I arrived with a van full of people and stuff which filled up all the empty spaces that she created. Anyway I came home filled with a desire to clear stuff out and get rid of it. When I’m in this mood I get so ruthless that I actually have to double check myself. I was packing away our big fluffy tree skirt and part of me claimed that it takes up too much space and I should just get rid of it. We hardly ever use it anyway. Umm, well yeah. It’s a Christmas decoration. It spends 11 months of the year in a box. I would be very sad next year if I got rid of it this year because I bought it myself and love it. All of our Christmas stuff fits inside 5 boxes and one huge tree duffle. That’s a whole lot less than most people have. To appease the get-rid-of-it desire, I did pitch a couple of broken tree ornaments.

Tomorrow we embark on another 5 months of school schedule. I think these five will be better than the last five were. At the very least these five months will present new and different challenges.