Saturday Morning Scorecard

This was the scene when I left work this evening.  Aside from nights when I've gone down there after hours, it's the first time I've walked out of the building to see headlights blazing into a rainy, dusk-darkened sky as I hit the crosswalk.  Perhaps I should not have worn black slacks and a navy Hawaiian shirt today, but I hadn't planned on needing to being seen by cars after dark.  The newly-painted crosswalk was nicely visible, though, even if I wasn't.  The way the left-turners cut me off nearly every day, I've seriously considered making myself a sandwich board that says, "Try not to hit the pedestrian in the crosswalk!"

A couple of the photos I took after work came out looking rather mysterious.  I like 'em, so I'll share them with you, unedited except for resizing.  Can you tell what's in these pictures?  No fair scrolling down yet!  Give them your best guess first.








My tendency to over-promise - to you folks, at church, at work, at home, even to myself - continues unabated. Friday night was going to be my catch-up night, when I finally kept some of those promises.  And why not?  This is the one night of the week I can stay up late with impunity, because afterwards I usually sleep well into Saturday afternoon. But Saturday starts in 20 minutes as I start to write this, and there's still a long checklist of things I need to do, marked up with my mental notes of all my successes and failures.  Let's take a look at that scorecard, shall we?

Work: B. Hard-working, innovative, but inefficient.  I have a fairly long list of duties at work, in several unrelated aspects of accounting.  The way my monthly schedule goes, I have about two weeks each month, interrupted by one pressing 2-day job, in which to work on long-term projects and try to get current on everything.  After that it's crunch time again, and I'm scrambling to do all the things that must be done right away to complete the monthly figures.  Well, the relatvely leisurely part of the month ended on Monday or so, but my work on the long-term stuff has continued, because it must be done!  I still have a lot of stuff to do, and no time to do it; so I'll be going in to the office over the weekend. 

Home: C-.  Messy and oblivious.  This house was pretty clean for a while, but I've let it get out of control again.  I did get most of the dishes done, though.  One of the Friday night projects should involve cleaning up my photo boxes after my scavenger hunt for DeLoreans and erzatz courthouses.  On the plus side, I did call the roofer yesterday, for at least the fourth time since faxing my acceptance of the reroofing estimate.  It's been almost a month, and they haven't called back yet to actually schedule the work, even though the money for it is sitting in escrow.  My co-worker tells me that when she typed the word Tucson yesterday into a web site that recommended roofers by region, the response said that no roofers were available in the area.  They're all booked up!  But can't I get a phone call, guys?  Tell me you'll be there to do it in February, if need be, but tell me something! 

Diet and Exercise: C.  Could be worse.  Only about half of the sort-of-healthy treats from the Monday Photo Shoot are gone from my drawer at work, and I haven't bought any ice cream all week.  My trainer insisted that I was noticeably stonger this time when doing my hack squats, or whatever they're called, and I've slightly improved my attendence at the gym.  But I still have a long way to go if I want to make any progress on the weight.

Blogging: A.  Good stuff - but at what cost?  I could try to be modest here, but I know I've had a couple of good entries this week. Problem is, it took me many hours to put them together!  Yes, I got them posted by 1 AM as promised, give or take a minute or two.  But that was usually after starting on them at 7 or 8 PM, and my proofreading and editing continued well past the posting deadline.

Sleep: D-.  Erratic and Insufficient.  Sorry, Vince and Sam and everyone.  I've tried, really I have, but the blogging deadline mostly has not resulted in actually getting to bed earlier.  I've had a few good nights, but also a few appallingly bad ones.

Church Web: D.  Tardy and Incomplete.  I try to get the weekly schedule and announcements posted every Sunday night before I go to bed, but this week it was something like 3 AM by the time I got just the schedule part done, plus an update of the staff and clergy pages and some church-related photo editing.  Every night this week, I was going to go back and get the announcements in, but I ran so late with everything else that it took me until Friday night to actually do it.  That doesn't leave people much time to find out about stuff that's scheduled for Saturday morning! Tonight I also got a 4-week-old sermon scanned, edited and uploaded--finally.  I hope the people who were waiting to read it weren't too disappointed by the delay!  I still need to redo the Community page, replacing all the 2004 photos with 2005 ones.  It sounds like a big, work-intensive job, though, and I'm frankly not too thrilled with this year's photos, especially since the camera started acting up.  When am I going to have time to work on this?

Writing:  C-.  Sporadic, slapdash and uninspired.  I almost scrapped the ending of Part 30 of Mall of Mâvarin on Sunday, but it's hard to redo a bit you don't like when you can't come up with anything better.  I've done maybe ten pages of Heirs of Mâvarin editing this week, all in the Chapter 3 document on my laptop; and I'd made edits and notes in Chapters One and Two of Mages of Mâvarin in my hard copy.  I've promised Sarah that I'd finish the Heirs edit ASAP so I have submit it somewhere, and I've promised Sara that this weekend I'd type up the missing scene from the very end of Mages.  Well, maybe I can work on one or the other for a bit tonight.

Karen, you're asking too much of yourself, some of you are probably saying.  You need to take better care of yourself, cut back on your activities, make fewer promises.  Yes, I know.  We've had this discussion before, haven't we?  But I have good reasons for doing - or,at least, trying to do - every one of those activities mentioned above.  Work on fixed assets must be finished.  The house must be cleaned, and roofing arrangements made.  I must get my body under control, so I don't end up old and sick as my mom was.  People at church are counting on me, and Rani and Cathma, not to mention Sara and Sarah, deserve to see the novels well and truly finished and edited and submitted.  But how will I find the time?  And don't tell me to cut back on my blogging, either.  That's my lifeline.

Photos - the alternate shot, also unedited except for size, with explanation:



This is the side of the church and the Episcopal flag, flanked by cloud above and rainy car roof below.  The previous, similar shot was taken with flash (oops!); the one shown here was without flash.

The bottom of the mountain shot is also the car roof.  It was just barely raining, but that was enough to do interesing things with the standing water over surprisingly reflective indigo paint.

Ah, the heck with it.  I'm going to bed now.

Karen