Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

There is something completely out of whack when it seems like reckless abandonment to flip through magazines for half an hour.

That said, I am doing *slightly* better on the chore-life balancing. Slightly. I'm certainly glad that I made time to go to Chort's last annual privateer feast. I'm even gladder that I put an antique candle mold on the flea market table - that went fast and I hope it brought in good money. It was a bittersweet time last night, knowing that this was the last, and knowing that this year we were donating money not for Team Wench's generic cancer fundraiser but for our hostess' medical bills.

I've sold an essay. I don't actually know for how much, though, which is hardly the grownup way to be a writer.

Although I'm not using the kanban board I built on the fridge, the idea of splitting all my chores into agile sprints appears to be a good one. However, I'm already having to fight the idea that "oh, yeah, I need to work on that eventually" is an appropriate way of dealing with the chore du sprint, and the fact that some important things are falling through the cracks because I haven't thought to write them up as a sprint. So the bones are good, but I need a little more discipline.

Don't I always! You may start getting a Sunday 7 list from me. Boring, I know, but the public name-and-shame of it has always helped me keep on track.

However, I can also point to a couple of little victories. Finances, for one. I'm one of those people who just threw everything - receipts, statements, bills, ATM slips, etc., into a bin and then stuffed the contents of said bin into a holding box for the legal 7 years. Just tossing things places was quick, but inconvenient to dig anything up.

So two months ago I sat down and took an old bunch of large envelopes. On the front is a list of each monthly bill I have to pay, so I can see when I did and how much. Clipped to the back of the current month's envelope is a tally sheet so I can write down how much I pay the credit cards (all but 1 are paid off and the last one will be done soon, but I still want to know how much I use them for over a year), a tally sheet so I can track the status of the furlough loan, and the rent slip for M. In the upcoming months are blank rent slips, a deposit slip, and the appropriate pages out of the mortgage and furlough loan books so I can pull them out when they're due.

There's a differently colored envelope for tax stuff, with its own check list.

I'm still basically throwing things in a bin... but it's a bin sorted by month that makes it very easy for me to leave notes for myself, organizes my paperwork where I'll need it and when I'll need it, and lets me keep track of everything at a glance. Not bad.

What's even better is that sniffing around my piles of "This may be useful someday" stuff has coughed up enough envelopes for me to have another 5 years of this system before I have to purchase anything for it. I also found yet a third set of envelopes good for using for investment mailings.

... and to give you some idea of how much of a packrat I am, they're labelled with various months in 1994.

Turns out that there is such a thing as the British Embassy Players (originally, yes, from the embassy) and they do panto! So last night I got to see Cinderella. The general quality was "earnest community theater" but the guy playing Frou Frou was absolutely HILARIOUS and if the other ugly stepsister wasn't as funny, they worked beautifully together. ("I got this dress for a ridiculous figure." "Yes, yours." // "I've been told I have Scandanavian looks." "He said you look like an 'orse.")

Today was a run to the Book Thing, where I scored a well-loved 1938 copy of "The Manual of Modern Cooking" among others. (1938, and they've already got recipes that have "1 can of cream of mushroom soup.")

And there have been a series of little victories. One was for an old system - I wanted a short sleeved shirt to layer under something I was going to wear to work and couldn't find it. So I went to the off-season wardrobe, the knit shirt section, and it was in my hands in less than a minute. I CAN get an organized house! Now to just organize the rest of it...

Other little victories: The new agile sprint board on the side of the fridge warned me that I couldn't crank out 3 essays of any quality at the same time, so I bumped one to summertime. That saved me some stomach lining.

Then M took down the gunky, disgusting blades from the ceiling fan so she could scrub them. I said "how about leaving them down and putting them, their screws, and the pull down in the basement in a bag, so we can pull them out when we need them in midsummer but they won't collect grease and dust all year? That saved us some scrubbing.

And I hit up the local credit union's big "learn to do stuff and maybe win an ipad!" expo on my way back from the books and not only got a bunch of little jobs done but won a couple of Amazon gift cards for participating.