I’ll admit it. I never saw a flow chart I didn’t like. I love counting backwards, figuring when I have to leave to get there by then. Planning, planning, planning.
So why – already in August – am I railing about back-to-school sales?
Nature abhors a vacuum.
That must be why, weeks after clearing the kitchen cabinets of clutter, I felt a sudden urge to jump in the car in an obsessive search for a deviled egg carrier.
I own a lovely meditation cushion. I have some quieting meditation CDs. And I’m a huge advocate of learning to be “in the moment.”
But with all that, I’ve got to admit. I’m not a good Om… person. So when I saw a blog post that said anything could be meditation – anything – I was off and running. (Admittedly, this is my usual state, which is part of the problem.)
I never met an organizing book I didn’t like. So when I bumped into the best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I couldn’t wait.
I grabbed it from the bookstore shelf and inhaled it with a cup of coffee in the café.
The traveling world used to break down between those who stuck with predictable McDonald’s for their road food and those who followed the hand-made signs to Abe’s Wiener Wonderland.
As an Abe’s person (there is such a place – honest), I’ve been thrilled to discover that I can now take the adventures from road food to an entire overnight stay.
With apologies to those who are, I must confess that I am not an avowed dog-lover. Normally I cower when friendly canines take a flying leap into my lap. I startle when they lick my face. The thought of doggie halitosis makes me cringe.
But this is all subject to one puzzling exception: my long-distance granddogs.
“Oh, my gosh!” my husband exclaims, watching a 1970s episode of The Doris Day Show. “That’s the same actor who played in M*A*S*H. What was his name?”
By now, we both know that for me it’s a rhetorical question. My only M*A*S*H answer is “Alan Alda,” and it is always wrong.
A seasoned catastophizer, I can take a hangnail to an amputation in under 30 seconds.
So it was no wonder that the Christmas cold that turned into the New Year’s sinus infection and the deep rumbling cough would send me to the nurse practitioner, the Internet, the pharmacy twice and – in my dreams – a pharmacy urgent care center staffed after hours by a checkout clerk.
It wasn’t enough to add the usual baking and shopping and holiday partying to the December agenda.
It was also the perfect time, I decided, to upgrade my laptop operating system and get a new phone.
When merchants closed their doors on Thanksgiving and even (gasp) dropped out of Black Friday, I whooped.
“I haven’t felt this good about the holidays since I created the family gift exchange,” I told my husband. “It simplified everything!”