For weeks now, I have had two books on my desk begging for me to excerpt passages for you. There are also movies, links to interesting websites, and long pointless ramblings that are dying to be excreted onto these virtual pages. Yet, somehow I just can’t get to it all.
How do I account for my time?
I can’t. To my knowledge, I haven’t blacked out, I haven’t gone on wild drinking binges, I haven’t been in any comas, I don’t recall any alien abductions (though I wouldn’t, would I), and I’m pretty sure that I experience every day sequentially as it appears on the calendar. I’m just losing time.
This weekend, I spent hours going through gobs of emails, paying bills, and cleaning the kitchen. Somehow that comprised most of Saturday. When I write it down, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up.
Yesterday, in preparation for my trip to Cooperstown, I started organizing my toiletries. My husband has the idea that we’re going to pack everything into our carry-ons to avoid the checked bag fees. That means I have to figure out a way to squeeze my liquid toiletries into three ounce or smaller containers within one one-quart Ziploc bag for the Security Nazis. This project alone evolved into a two hour process of not just carefully reorganizing my travel bag, patiently squeezing conditioner into a tiny container, tapping it on the counter to let the air out, adding more, tapping, drizzling more conditioner, tapping, for what seemed like an hour, refilling the shampoo, fixing the spray nozzle on the miniature hair spray bottle, finding the right size bottle for sunscreen and filling that, and so on, but reorganizing the entire bathroom, medicine cabinet, and vanity.
Satisfied when it was all done (as if it will be the last time I ever have to do it), I proceeded with checking off the next thing on my to-do list. Something simple. Synchronizing my Palm. Simple. Except that simple things are never simple. Instead I spent an hour or more in an argument with the computer (I have yet to win one of these fights), backing up my contacts, uninstalling Documents to Go, trying to reinstall Documents to Go, not being able to reinstall it, not being able to figure out why!!, cursing Vista, cursing computers, giving up, and essentially, blowing the rest of Sunday evening on something that in the end, I have very little to show for my time.
This is how the weekends go. They go. I just don’t know how.
Sadly, there was a time when I spent nearly every weekend on a hike in the mountains. Now? I spend hours complaining to innocent readers that I don’t know where my time goes.