After a couple of weeks of phone tag, I finally talked to Michelle last night and it was good to hear from her. We were on the phone for almost an hour catching up, which explains, in part, why I didn’t get to bed until after 10 PM. I didn’t have to get up until 5:30 this morning, however, because I’m doing my workout with Bernard this afternoon (my last one with him).
I’m crazy-busy at work. Aside from tying up lose ends on projects that are more or less completed, I’m working at a mad pace to complete a project that’s supposed to be finished up this month (not going to happen), and I’ve started on a new project that’s schedule to last through about this time next year! I’ve been flooded with requests for minor changes and fixes on other projects on which I’ve worked. I literally cannot keep up with it all. I hate the feeling, and do my best not to put undo pressure on myself, but it’s still an uncomfortable feeling.
Before I went to bed last night, I tried to relax. I had a tall glass of chocolate milk while reading more of I. Asimov and for a time, I forgot about work and some of my other projects that have been stressing me out. I’ve got a full plate and it makes it hard to do just about anything else in my day. Among the non-work projects I have going:
- Learning Italian with Rosetta Stone, which I haven’t used in a few days now
- My SCIENCE FICTION AGE reading, which I’ve taken a break on so that I can read my Asimov autobiographies
- Writing, in general. I haven’t done any writing in a month or so, and that’s not good, but there just hasn’t been time. I’ve got 5 stories in various phases of completion but haven’t touched them in a while
- My workouts, which take up about 1-1/2 hours of my day, each day
This doesn’t really leave much time for anything else and things have suffered for it. The house is a mess, for instance, as is the yard. I think I’ll have to cut the grass this weekend. It’s likely that I will spend the entire weekend “spring cleaning” just to add some order to my life. I don’t have kids and I sometimes wonder how people with kids managed to get done all of the non-kid-related things they need to get done. I just don’t know how they do it. I’m up at 4:30 AM, typically, and I’m in bed between 8:30 and 9:30 PM. That gives me 16-17 hours in the day, 8 of which I am working. That leaves 8-9 hours. Roughly 1 hour is devoted to my commute and another hour and a half to workouts, which brings us down to 5-6 hours. It takes about an hour or so each evening to do my various chores (cleaning up the kitchen, packing my lunch, doing some laundry, etc.) That leaves me 4-5 hours. You’ve got to factor in meals which probably occupied 2 hours of my day–which leaves 2-3 hours remaining. I probably spend an hour or so blogging each day, on average. That leaves 1-2 hours on average for me to do anything else, write, read, learn Italian. And the softball season hasn’t even started yet. And that doesn’t count simple down time, where I crash on the couch for a little while and doze; or go for a walk after work. I have a literal dearth of time to get done what I want to get done. I could stay up later, but I wouldn’t be as productive. About the best I can do is pick and choose my activities carefully. Yet when I’m learning Italian, I feel like I should be writing. And if I sit down and try to write, I feel like I should be learning Italian, or reading, or any number of other things.
How did I ever get this busy?
It’s almost tax time and my new tax person told me yesterday that she received all my paperwork and would be contacting me with questions soon. Add another item to my list. I’d love to be able to sneak to L.A. for a weekend and see some of my friends out there but I simply can’t find the time to do it. Eventually, something has got to give. The question is, what will it be?
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