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At this point, I am so totally over the whole 'getting along without a computer' thing. I am a techno-dependent nerd, and I freely admit it. Writing out reports in long hand and relying on the fax instead of email is a total waste if time and effort. Thank goodness I have web access through my cell phone, however limited it may be!

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We're not ready for the Olympics. But at least I didn't embarrass myself with the group tonight.

Well, not much anyway.

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My son made it home. :)

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It's Wednesday night, which means I'm off to enjoy a little time with the knitting group. My NYC shawl is finished (I just need to block it) so I've moved on to the Fitted Rib Top. With everything on my calendar right now, I really wanted the easiest project to work on.

Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it. Plan more than you can do, then do it. (Anonymous)

I have 18 days to finish packing up my house in order to move October 1st. So far I've sorted through the garage and most of the den. I still have my bedroom, the attic closet, the living room, kitchen, pantry, and porch storage. The kids are old enough to do their own rooms. At least, I hope so.

I'm planning a huge yard sale, since I won't have room in the new apartment for my house-worth of stuff. My sister has offered to hold the sale at her house, which is gratefully appreciated since I won't have a yard anymore. I just have to get everything down to her before then.

I have to help find a group home for my client to move into after his mother's funeral on Saturday.

I'm supposed to be helping my sister plan her wedding renewal to celebrate her 25th anniversary in October. I offered to help her find or make a gown, but that was obviously before I realized that there aren't a dozen weekends in September.

We're also planning a special get-together for my aunt's 70th birthday in October. And my daughter is coming down as well. So I have to have everything unpacked and organized by October 8th.

And I won't even go into the ridiculously long list of reports and goals that I have due at work.

So with all of these stress-inducing deadlines looming above me, naturally I decided to start plans for a Gathering in North Carolina.

Seriously. I had such a great time on vacation this past weekend. But mom and I kept talking about how much we enjoyed the Family Gathering in 2006, and how we really should get together with everyone again. We've all been saying that for four years now. And there's been one reason after another why we haven't done it. (This is a bad year for this person, next year would be better. But that's a bad year for that person, so maybe another year...)

Well, enough is enough. I'm tired of just saying that we should do it but we never actually get to go. I am taking mom and the kids camping in Cherokee again next summer. It won't be until July 2010, so there's plenty of time to make our plans. Hopefully we can get most of the Neuhaus/Williams family there, along with friends and relatives -- Y'all are invited! There's a group on Facebook, or just leave me a comment here if you're interested.

The only reason we ask other people how their weekend was is so that we can tell them about our own weekend. (Chuck Palahniuk)

I had a wonderful weekend. Mom and I took my daughter and her friend Mia to Orlando, and we just hung around the resort the entire time. There were eight hot tubs, four pools, two lazy rivers, and a poolside bar that made wonderful margaritas. When we weren't in the water, we had miniature golf and karaoke to amuse us. (I was the champion of both!)

Even though I brought Daisy (my laptop) with me with the full intention of writing up a couple of reports for work, I managed to resist the temptation to work. Instead I finished my shawl and read a smutty romance book. (I'm not sure how well that will go over in Tuesday's meeting, but que sera sera.)

Now that we're back home, I figure I have probably about half an hour before I start to unpack and begin to panic over all the stuff I didn't do because I was away enjoying myself. But for now, it was a wonderful weekend!

The time to relax is -- when you don't have time for it. (Sidney J. Harris)

Right now I should be packing up the rest of the den and starting on the living room. Instead, I'm gathering up my bathing suit, an extra knitting project, and a couple of books. In the morning, after a (hopefully) brief stop at the radiologist, we're heading to Daytona Beach. And this time tomorrow I'll be relaxing by the pool, enjoying a large margarita and totally forgetting that there's a To-Do list two pages long waiting for me.

I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages. (William H. Mauldin)

It's Wednesday, so this really should be a WIPs and FOs posting. But the only thing I'm knitting the same NYC Shawl, which still isn't finished yet, although I'm getting close. More importantly, I'm just not in the mood for knitting.

Right now I feel like the whole world is throwing it's garbage at me (okay, maybe they're throwing something much smellier than garbage, but I try awfully hard not to say those types of words).

Excuse me a minute as I deviate from my planned whine. As I was typing the previous paragraph, I heard someone say "Here's a little song I wrote, you might want to sing it."

WHAT? Please understand that Becka is out walking the dog, and I'm alone in the house (making it the perfect time to sit around feeling sorry for myself). Except who the heck (hey, this calls for strong language!) is talking?

"Don't worry. Be happy."

Wait a minute. That sounds familiar.

"In every life you have some trouble. When you worry, you make it double. Don't worry. Be happy."

I know that song. Being the very brave person that I am, I looked out front and sure enough, there's a car passing by with the windows open. It was only coincidence that it happened to be playing that song, keeping me from telling you the long list of problems I've had to deal with today. Lucky you.

"So don't worry. Be happy."

Leave each one his touch of folly; it helps to lighten life's burden. (John Lancaster Spalding)

I really don't know why my daughter found it funny that I only had green M&Ms left. I mean, obviously I ate the horrible blue ones first, to get rid of them. (They gave me a stomachache, but that's to be expected.) Then naturally I had to eat the orange ones, since they're almost as bad as the blues. After that I got to eat the yellow m&ms, and the red ones. That left just the brown ones and the greens. And you always keep the best for last, right?

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness. (Franz Kafka)

I have a horrible habit. Well, I probably have several horrible habits. But right now, I'm only concerned with one, because it's the one that has me totally paralyzed.

I make lists.

Lots of lists.

I list everything in the freezer, so that I know what we have for dinners. I list everything packed in the attic boxes, so that when I need a particular item I can actually find it. I list when the bills are due, and when the chores should be done (which is how I remember to change the AC filter regularly), and when birthday cards should be mailed. I list the library books and their due dates.

Lists are good. They really do help to keep track of things. But if you take it too far, they can be overwhelming. And that's what's happening to me. I've got such great, detailed lists of what needs to be done that I've realized that it's completely beyond me to do everything and I'm feeling very depressed.

It started out innocently enough. It always does. We're going to be moving at the end of the month, and I need to sort through all our stuff to decide what to take with us to the (much smaller) new apartment and what we can get rid of. I could have just trusted that we'd get it done since there's plenty of time (almost four weeks). But then there's the danger that we'd put off doing anything because there's plenty of time, until all of a sudden it's two days before the move and we haven't started yet. And by the way, I'm using the pronoun "we" although the responsibility is really "me." (I am aware of that. It just feels better to say we instead of me.) So I made a list of the rooms to be packed, so that they could be scheduled evenly in the time we had. There are twelve rooms and four weeks; three rooms per week. That would have been fine.

Except I took it a step further. I wanted to make sure that we didn't forget the closet, or the file cabinet, or the pantry, or the cupboard under the stair. (Oh, wait, that was Harry Potter. Never mind.) So I expanded the list to include a checklist of all the areas of all the rooms. It still wasn't too bad.

Except. I realized that "Pack bookcases" wasn't really descriptive enough. I have five bookcases in the den, each of which is overloaded with at least two rows of books per shelf. And there are more books lying in piles in front of the bookcases. So the list was revised to read:
1. Sort through books for Keep/GiveAway/Sell.
2. Put keep-books back on bookcases, to ensure that they fit and I'm not keeping too many.
3. Pack bookcases.

And again, this could have been acceptable except while starting to sort through the books I found a bunch that I haven't read in a while. So I had to modify the list:
1. Sort through books for Keep/GiveAway/Sell/NotSure
1A. Read the NotSure books to decide whether to Keep/GiveAway/Sell
2. Organize Keep-books alphabetically by author/subject while ensuring that they fit on bookcases
3. Pack bookcases.

Maybe that's a bad example. I admit that reading the NotSure books is a little bit over the top (especially since I've already got two banana boxes full of NotSure books). So let's go to another room.

The attic closet was orginally one item on the To-Do list. After all, it's already packed up. I even have complete lists of everything in every box. Oh but wait. There are over 25 boxes in the attic closet. (I'm talking big Rubbermaid tubs.) In the new apartment, I'm only going to have one closet for the attic stuff and my clothes, not two different closets like I have now. So obviously something has to go. I'm going to have to sort through all the boxes to decide what I want to get rid of and what I want to keep. So the list went from "Move attic boxes to new house" to:
4. Bring all the attic boxes downstairs.
5. Go through each box, deciding what to keep and what to sell.
6. Repack boxes, making new lists of contents.

I am now looking at a two page list of stuff that needs to be done in the next four weeks. Ohmygosh what was I thinking? There is no way all this stuff will get done. How did I ever think this was move was going to be do-able?

Do you see what I'm up against? Maybe I just need to add one more thing:
7. Remember to BREATH