two months in - an action plan

In the last post, I gave myself a 3.6 out of 10 on the scale of work-life balance. Which, I say again, is pretty abysmal. I committed to developing an action plan so that my precious few non-work hours didn't slip away from me.  Well, my friends, the time has come to commit to that action plan publicly, in front of you.  This is mostly for my own self, to hold me accountable, but if anyone has suggestions, they would be appreciated in the comments!

Also, sorry about the lack of pictures, but this post is very serious.  Also I only had a short amount of time to work on it.

1. Gardening. Just so you know, the lawn is no longer a foot tall.  I mean, it's a good 8 inches again, but not a foot, and it's been raining all week.  Kathy and I have decided a good way to handle this is that one day a week, when I can get out on time, I'll mow while she cooks dinner.  Usually one of us cooks and the other bops around the kitchen chatting, so this is a small sacrifice of some family time together, but we make a point of sitting down as a family for dinner each night, so we will have to catch up then.  Also, C has baseball games each Saturday morning, so when it's our weekend with the kids, I'll stay home while the rest of the crew goes to the baseball game, so I can do the other gardening -- weeding, mulching, planting, etc.  I bought a flat of annuals for some fun color and we actually have an enormous amount of mulch left over from last year stashed in various places, so I am all ready for the implementation phase.  Two hours every other weekend is not as much time as I would like in my garden, but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing.

And Kathy has promised to help me plant Stewart.

two months in

One of the main reasons that I quit my job last year was to enable me to focus a bit more on the non-work things I loved about life.  These were things like gardening, cooking, reading, working on my house, and exercising.  When I decided to go back, I also decided to really focus on making sure that I was doing these things regularly.  In corporate speak, this is called work-life balance.  It's something I was sorely missing before and actually thought, at one point, was impossible for a lawyer.  So, now that I've been at my new job for two months (two months!) I decided to check in and see how I was doing.

1.  Gardening.  I revealed last week that our lawn had grown to a foot in height.  Nothing has been weeded, unless you count randomly pulling clover out of the cracks of the driveway as I walk to the front door at the end of a work day.  There are no annuals in the ground, no vegetables in the raised bed (except the garlic, planted last year) and I haven't spread compost or mulched a single thing.  The Stewartia is still in it's shipping pot, sitting on top of its future home.  I did manage to mow the lawn on Monday after work, which took me about twice as long as normal because I had to bag the extra-long lawn clippings, and decided to mow the patio so at least the weeds were as short as the grass. 0 out of 10.

the return of insomnia

It's 5:42 am.  I've been up since 3:08.  For the first hour and two minutes, I tossed and turned.  Finally, I got up and started cleaning, because I didn't know what else to do with myself and the house was a wreck.  From 4:10 until 5:20, I unloaded the dishwasher, reloaded it and did all the dishes by hand that needed to be done, straightened up the living room, put some tools away in the basement, tidied up the office, threw away massive piles of accumulated mail, and cleaned the bathroom.  Then I sat down to pay bills, which I've been doing since 5:20.  Sometime around 5:15, A came down and went to the bathroom.

"What's going on?" she asked, bewildered, as she looked around the house, lights blazing in the middle of the night.

"I'm cleaning. There was no other time to do it."

This is true, and not true.  There was no other time to do it, but that's not why I was doing it.  I was doing it because I could not sleep, and the state of our house was driving me crazy, so there seemed an obvious solution.

(photo via here)