BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!

So Monday night on the news they said that they had done a study and January 23rd (actually meaning the 4th Monday in January) is the most depressing day of the year. Why?? Because it’s a Monday for one thing, it’s the middle of winter, most everyone is facing huge Christmas debt (the bills are starting to come in) and by then most have failed on all their New Year’s resolutions. Hmmm – I wonder how much of my tax money they spent on a study like that?

Okay, so I start wondering, is that why I am feeling down and out of sorts or is it the overwhelming feeling of having a million and two things to get done this year and time is moving way tooooooooo quickly. So, I open up an excel spread sheet and start modifying my lists, changing expected completion dates and reprioritizing.

I’ve always loved making lists – pieces of paper everywhere with small lists – grocery items, things I need to pick up at Jo-ann’s, things to accomplish this week (just breathe). If I have a piece of paper in my hand, you can be sure I’ve jotted down two or three items for some good reason. But now with computers, I can make even bigger lists – excel is wonderful and I can make a worksheet for each thing I want to make a list for.

A different worksheet for each room in the house and things I want to do in that room – paint, flooring, change out the door knob. A worksheet for grocery items I need to buy to stock the pantry, another for grocery items needed for the week. A worksheet for the many quilting projects I’ve either started or want to start – right now, I have about 15 quilts in various stages of completion and fabric for another 20 or so (or course not all the fabric but some of it). It’s easy to make a column for an expected completion date, status, approximate cost and comments.

One of the items that has been on my list for a while was to reframe the southwestern embroidery that Mom had done for Dad. 1 huge pot with dried plants in and 2 smaller ones. I had them hanging in my house in Oracle and Ely but by the time we got them moved to Colorado, they were starting to fall apart from all the moving so I dismantled them and tossed the old frames. A couple of weeks ago, I got on one of my favorite web sites http://www.americanframe.com/ and ordered the frames. Last week, I spent a whopping two hours assembling the frames, mounting the embroidery on backing board and hanging the pictures. It’s nice to have something familiar back on the wall. (of course, the UPS lady wanted to know if I did framing in my spare time – she’s so funny.) So nice to be able to mark one of my tasks off my list and put a completion date on it.

So, working on one thing at a time and trying hard not to add too many more items, maybe I will get that list whittled down to 999,982 by the end of the 2006. Note to self: start a new worksheet for things to take to the reunion in June and don’t forget to add Salmon fishing in 2007.