Friday Ditch Day

I keep a to-do list. Sometimes it's written down, but most days, it's a list of priorities I've ticked off in my head before going to sleep at night and it's the first thing I'm thinking about in the morning.

The list is ongoing -- I never cross everything off and go, "hey! I don't have anything I need to do! I get to go out and play!" The list is always there, sometimes shrinking, usually growing -- or mutating into something frightening.

If nothing on it is too pressing, I make play time for myself. Lately, I've held a couple of informal "Mom's Movie Club" outings with a friend (she's my gymnastics carpool partner as her daughter is Megan's best friend both in school and at gym). I would love to do this weekly, but stuff always comes up. Like today -- I have a guy coming to the house to measure our windows (yes -- as part of our "every-other-year home upgrade one-project-at-a-time so we can pay it off as we go " plan, we are finally replacing our UGLY 40-year-old aluminum windows with energy-efficient, pretty vinyl ones. This is a good thing, since the sliding glass door leading out to the backyard has been broken for something like five years -- a period my husband and I spent arguing over what to replace it with. I wanted to just get a new slider -- he wanted French doors (which cost more). I was worried that if we did that, it would be a glaring mismatch with the rest of the house. So we put it off and put it off until we had the money to do the whole thing at once.

I'm glad about this, because since our car break-ins last month, I'm feeling a little bit insecure in our home. The locks on the old windows are ridiculous. Forget about that slider! I am going to feel a lot better once the new stuff has been put in. (Of course, a really determined criminal could just break the windows -- but I can't allow myself to think about that right now.)

Anyway... as I said, since I have to be home between the hours of 12 and 1, I can't call a meeting of the Mom's Movie Club. So I really should try to tick one or two items off the To Do List. The problem is, I'm not all that excited about doing any of them!

Right now, the list includes:

Writing two DotMoms posts (including a book review I'd promised them two weeks ago) - I've had several false starts on these and am having a problem finishing them.

Starting my taxes - I had planned to be done with these by February 15 - wait, that was YESTERDAY. OK, let's shoot for Feb 28.

Reconciling my checkbook and paying some bills - I should probably do this after writing the check for 50% of the window job

Making doctor and dentist appointments for myself - Ugh.

Housework - (Yeah. I'm not that desperate yet.)

To compound my dilemma, the weather is just gorgeous today. Sunny, warm, not a cloud in the sky, which is blue for a change. It's the kind of day that inspires high school kids to ditch class (not that I ever did anything like that -- if my teenage niece and nephew are reading this...)

This would be a good day to grab the husband's gorgeous new Lumix camera (the one I got to play with briefly in London) and just shoot some photos so I could possibly get good at using it. Gareth has always been something of a shutterbug, and lately, he's gotten quite good at it. I've been inspired by both him and my friends, DrumsNWhistles and TwistOfKate. In fact, I did do this yesterday, when I had 20 minutes to kill, so I walked up the street and took the photo you see above.

Or I could just bite the bullet, print out the tax forms, call the doctor/dentist, make another pot of coffee, write the DotMoms posts and balance my checkbook.

Being a grown-up sucks.

Comments

[Laura]

Taking pictures is so much more fun!