Day After Day After Christmas

Now that I have eaten my way through three tins of cookies and several plates of fudge, it is time to turn my thoughts to using the rest of winter break productively. Next week I'll be heading back East for the poetry retreat I've attended for the past few years. This means that I have nine days between now and then to accomplish great things.

I meant to start accomplishing great things this morning, but so far I've mainly accomplished small things. I made my master list of all that I had to do, with 92 items on it. Of course, I write everything on the list, including the very smallest items, because I so love the motivating momentum of being able to cross things off: make a vet appointment for Snickers (done!), get tickets for the King Tut exhibit at the Denver Art Museum for this Wednesday (done!), transfer money to pay Gregory's college bill for the coming semester (done!), re-read a beautiful little book of Advent meditations before putting it away to read again next December (done!). Somehow it has taken me three hours to do these things. How can that be? I've crossed off seven things total so far this morning, of those 92, but they were all so small and yet somehow they took so long. Oh, well, at least they're done. If I hadn't made my gloriously detailed list, I might not have accomplished even those seven. Better seven than none, right?

I know that it would have been a better use of my time to pick one of the big, important things and do that instead, even if it was the only thing I managed to do today: e.g., work for one hour on a writing project. Actually, I could still do that, but somehow the luster is off the morning. Maybe I'll do at least three more tiny things for an even ten: I'll reply to three Christmas cards (I didn't send cards this year, so now need to do something to respond to the interesting notes on the cards I did receive); I'll send a nagging email to a journal that has had one of my articles for three months now; oh, and writing this blog counts, too. So that will be ten out of 92. Just 82 left to go.