Running Late Today

How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

– Dr. Suess

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The Best Time To Branch Out

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

– Anonymous

Past Present Tense

“That ‘past me,'” L’s mother sighed last night.  “Every problem I’m facing right now is because of her!”

Now Where Was I?

As I was going to say before I got roped into a zoo trip with L. this morning, sometimes its easy for time to get away from us.  Nobody knows this better than a writer who’s been told “I’ll read your book as soon as ______.”  You quickly learn that continuing silence after that statement means that for one reason or another, your book is gathering dust somewhere.

Mr. Phillion, in light of the significant delay since I last mentioned your book,  I wish you to know that your book is indeed gathering dust somewhere . . . in a shipping box in transit to my address as I type this.

You don’t get off that easily, bucko.

But I Guess I DID Ask For This, Come To Think . . .

This morning I sat down to write a quick entry about how sometimes it can be difficult to make time for things.

This afternoon I finally got a break from demonstrating that principle for long enough for me to say that I’ll do my best to write that entry tomorrow.

That Guy Can Be SUCH A Jerk

One of my pet peeves is someone leaving a household task half-finished, and since I don’t have a lot of time to do things around the house (because L. is three), I get doubly annoyed if that half-finished task somehow impedes what I’m trying to get done at any given moment. So when I got a moment today to throw a load of clothes in the washer, I was not happy to see that there were clothes in the dryer that hadn’t been put away.

Never mind that it would only take me an extra minute at most to take the clothes out of the dryer and out of my way, logic isn’t always the first response in these situations, you know. (And if you don’t know, try living with a three-year-old for a while.) So I rolled my eyes and silently vowed that somebody was going to pay for this delay . . . and I was right.

They were my clothes that I had put in the dryer and forgotten about.

If “past me” doesn’t learn to be more considerate soon, he’d better hope I never get my hands on him.

Time To Stop Doing That

My ability to travel through time is generally one of my more reliable skills. Usually I travel one second into the future every second, just like clockwork, really, but today something seemed to have gone amiss. After spending the approximate duration of the Roman Empire watching the clock crawl from 7:30 to 10:30 this morning, I decided I’d better take a look under the hood and see what was wrong.

Silly me. I’d left the parking brake on again.

Making Me A Bard In A Guilted Gauge, You Might Say

As I mentioned recently, my available free time isn’t what it once was; I truly am okay with this.(1)

But one of the things that does get to me from time to time is the realization of how little time I have right now for keeping in touch with people outside the walls of my house.  My friends and extended family(2) have been very understanding about the current strictures on my availability, but I still feel bad about it now and again.

For example, the other day an old friend I hadn’t talked to in months dropped me a line just to let me know “she wasn’t dead,” and while this made me happy, like I told her, “I thought about asking, but figured that if you were dead, you wouldn’t answer, and if you were alive, you’d drop me a line eventually.”

Have I mentioned I tend to get glib when I feel guilty over something?

So I’m definitely feeling some guilt over all this, particularly how often I choose to use my rare quiet moment to write instead of pick up the phone, but I don’t think I feel too guilty about it,  otherwise I wouldn’t be quite that glib.  Even so, I think I’ll set today aside to gauge how I really feel about this.(3)

*****

(1) I’m not always good with it, admittedly, but I am okay.

(2)  The ones still talking to me, I mean.

(3)  Yes, I really walked that far for today’s title joke.