This week I wanted to talk about fitting in things that have to be done now and then. One can set up a routine for the week to help one get the house cleaning and other tasks done, but every now and then (more now than then it seems) other things have to be done. Some are planned, some just pop up. Some are fun, but some are just things to be done - some even are things one dreads doing.
I have on numerous times mentioned our RV. The weather is getting cold. Before the weather gets freezing we have to winterize it. If you live in an area which gets cold in winter you probably know that if water freezes in your pipes they will split and you will have a problem. This is more likely to happen if the house or the area of the house where the pipe is located is not heated. (With the huge snow storms here the past few years this has happened to people who lost their electric power and had no heat. Husband worried about in our basement as some of the pipes are attached to the inside of the exterior walls as it was much colder than normal here and ran an electric heater in the basement to keep the pipes warm.) Winterizing the RV is, basically, getting all of the water out of the pipes, valves, etc. and replacing it with non-toxic anti-freeze. Sounds simple. It is not as that simple and there is an entire process that needs to be followed to do it - we have it written down, but still manage to always forget something. Today we winterized the RV.
My husband has started weaving on a loom this year. So, every week or so I help him do what is called “warping the loom”. This is putting the threads on the loom to weave through. It is a relatively tedious process. He needs my help to bring the warp threads out to a dowel to measure them out and then when all the threads are on the dowel, I bring the dowel to the loom - v e r y s l o w l y - and I keep tension on the threads, as he winds them onto the loom. When he finishes weaving a piece I know that he will soon be looking to warp the loom again. So, when he finished a piece, I knew that he would be looking to warp the loom. After we finished winterizing the RV - which took most of the afternoon, I saw him walk into the living room (where the loom is) and look around and sort of sigh. I knew what was going on. He wanted to warp the loom, but did not want to ask me to do so after spending the afternoon with the RV. I made the offer and we spent most of the rest of the time before dinner warping the loom.
So this afternoon was mostly used up with these two chores. I managed to check my email and that was about it. (I am writing this at night after dinner.)
I have worked as an accountant most of my life. (I started helping my dad add up columns of numbers when I was 12, so I do mean most of my life.) I have reached a point now where I have a couple of regular clients for whom I do their books on a regular basis and a handful of income tax clients. Unfortunately there is no exemption by IRS for a practice this small and I have to take annual classes and exams as the same as if I worked full time and actually made money doing this. While I can take the classes and exams as home study, it still is something else which must be fit into my time and takes about 20 hours in total. I get nervous every year about fitting time to take the exams into my schedule. I managed to do some of the smaller classes last night, which helped me get a bit less nervous. I still have some more of the smaller classes to do. I also have a large class and a 3 hour exam I have to take which I have not taken before. This scares the heck out of me. Not only do I have to do well on the exam to keep working - I also have to find a 3 hour block of time to take the exam. Somehow, I know I will do so - special things always manage to somehow be fit into one’s schedule.
Then I know that later this month the other big special things to do will start - Christmas decorating. Somehow no matter how busy we all are, we somehow manage to fit in decorating the house and the tree and buying and wrapping gifts. And then somehow, when it is all over, we find the time to take it all down and store it away. Okay - our decorations tend to stay up longer than they should - but the year they stayed up until April, it really was only because it was a freezing winter and our garage door froze to the ground and we could not get out the storage boxes to store the ornaments. So rather than take off the ornaments and leave them about, the tree stayed up. But for now, let us just think of the fun of decorating and how nice everything will look - if we can just find the time to decorate.
So, in between the normal daily, weekly, monthly tasks we all somehow manage to fit in these other tasks. How we do it varies from person to person and time to time. I just “found some time” I hope to keep available to get things done. On Monday nights I read comics online. Mostly I was reading the entire week of each comic’s strips. Some (most) weeks this reading ran over to Tuesday. Two weeks ago I decided it takes too much time. I looked through the strips as I read them. I dropped one strip. Five others I decided I will only read the Sunday strips. I like the characters, but can do with just a quick visit to them. (Sunday strips generally have nothing to do with weekday strips so I won’t be missing any “plot”.) Over time I may drop some of these strips, but I will see what I decide. The remaining strips are ones which I like the most and want to keep reading. This has cut out over an hour of time that I spent reading my comics and I now seem to be able to able to finish them on Monday night, leaving Tuesday night free for whatever else I need to do. (Hence, why I was able to take part of the classes I need to take last night.)
How do you fit in things which need to be done to your busy schedule? Do you need to fit in making Thanksgiving dinner next week?
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