Lifetime Piling Up

Like the song says, things are just heaping on top of each other.

I know I post frequently about having too many things to do, and I equally know that most of the time, it's due to poor time management on my part. Once in a while, yes, it's because there are too many reports, too many deadlines, too many things to read and places to drive kids to and events to attend and trips to take and bathrooms to clean and all the rest of it. But mainly it's just me, procrastinating.

And sometimes, of course, it's me again, but this time taking too much on. Like the report I agreed to co-author last year: lucrative, yes, but also far more work than I really had time for. Or the consulting I did recently, ditto, despite my best efforts to read mounds of paper on the bus to and from work. Somehow, a quick nap halfway through listening to the latest bargain-bin CD purchase always seems to win out over dry articles about the genetics of this, that and the proverbial other thing.

And then there's blogging.

Inspired by my good friend (and by good friend, I mean "bloke who currently lives in Australia, whom I've never met, but I bet we'd get on like a house on fire, if he didn't cause my untimely death as a result of a home-made hovercraft explosion), Black Knight, who at last count has no fewer than four blogs, I've agreed to contribute to a blog over at this place, where I already spend copious amounts of time. Shh. It's not a done deal yet, although I've vaguely promised (and I quote myself, or at least an email I bravely sent) to "manage one post a week reliably". Stop laughing, Rik.

This on top of the editorial piece I've also promised to write for them. I wonder, if I manage to produce all this stuff more or less on time, if they'll send me on another nice trip like the one to Arizona where I took this picture in between working very, very hard on their behalf (oh, and lounging around the pool too, I suppose):



Anyway, if all goes well, I'll soon be joining Alethea and a few other characters over at that place. I've promised something related to modern technologies, the difficulties in using thereof, and the frustration resulting therefrom. Sound familiar?

And, to start things off, having (more or less) wrapped my head around Blogger, I'll need to learn WordPress. I'm sure it will be dead simple, and not provide me with any annoyance or irritation whatsoever.*


*Certain aspects of this statement are almost certainly going to be proven false.


P.S. Speaking of Blogger, technology and irritation, can anyone explain to me why the newly-installed Internet Explorer 7 is now cutting off the top half of my blog's title? Standard kibbitzing about Microsoft will be gleefully ignored, but I'd really like to know. Thanks.

P.P.S. Thanks to a tip from Mosher (see the comments), I bravely adjusted the blog header's "padding", after intrepidly Googling to find out what the heck it is and how it works. Seems to have done the trick, although his comments (like Debi's before) about the teeny tiny text in the sidebar when viewed in Firefox, still need fixing. Any thoughts?

You know you're a parent if:

You are well aware that the side mirror on a car is at the same height as a child's head.


Or, if you post things like this because you don't have time to write a literary magnum opus.

Breakpoints

In five more minutes, I leave this hotel
this half-way house
for runners and failures
where anxiety, gentle yet disturbing
as a poem by Susan Musgrave
tightens heart
constricts chest


Every day has its turning points, its critical times that signal the end, or the beginning, or some other milestone that seems so important in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable day. There are always the checkpoints in the morning - far too early to be awake, too late to be starting the shower, late for the bus. And at the other end, the day is bookmarked with ten, eleven, twelve o'clock - bedtime's well past, and those morning worries are creeping up again, not so far off now. But during the day, well, there are always those other critical times, the ones that partition the day into manageable pieces, or if you like, fragment it into innings that are too short, or too rushed, or too crowded one into the other to let you really get things rolling.

10:00 AM - it's time to stop and think - what have I done so far? By ten-thirty, things had better be well underway, because when 11:00 rolls around, the morning is almost done, frittered away most likely and there's no hope of getting anything serious started and completed before lunch.

2:00 is the analogous time in the afternoon... either too late to be finishing lunch, far too late to be starting it, or, most likely, just about the time that I realize I'd better get my skates on if I want to complete a good chunk of work before the afternoon is over.

4:00 PM is a time when I begin to feel that gloomy late-afternoon feeling: the day is almost done, it's too late to get anything meaningful started and completed, in wintertime it's getting dark. I have to think about leaving on time to catch the bus. It's a depressing time of day, when the glorious, burnt-umber autumnal glow of three-something gives way to the gloom and wintry despair of 5:00.

And so home, that ever-present little shade of guilt at not having accomplished quite as much as I might have hoped. If only the day could be made to flow, streaming round those clockwork chicanes and streaking away to its end, all sail up the mast, afterburners on, sixth gear at the redline. Just think what could be achieved.