Sunday, January 9, 2005

I am continually amazed at how much I can do when I write down a to-do list at the beginning of the day.

For some reason, typing it out on the computer doesn’t help me much. When I’ve tried that before, I’ve accomplished a few of the items on the list, but not all of it. I think that typing it helped me to organize my thoughts, which made it easier for me to start on the list, but it wasn’t enough to finish it. There’s something important about putting pen to paper, that makes the list feel more real to me.

Anyvay. I finally cleaned up all of the mail that’s been piling up over the past week, calculated out my actual bank balance (which, unfortunately, won’t allow me to make any significant purchases for quite awhile), did laundry, finished updating matrix experiments lain with the artwork I got yesterday, and made a pot of chili.

I should mention that the chili is a variation on a recipe from great chef Alton Brown. It’s a bean-less chili that consists mostly of ground beef, as well as onions, garlic, beef stock, beer (!), some crushed tomatoes, and of course chopped chili peppers. It’s supposed to also contain roasted red bell peppers, but I left the peppers under the broiler for so long that they were almost completely blackened. I compensated with way more crushed tomatoes than called for in Alton’s recipe. The resulting chili was pretty good from what little I tasted before tossing it in the fridge. I can’t wait to try it tomorrow for lunch.

I actually didn’t accomplish everything on my list. The one item that remained undone was proofing the rest of that novel. I told its author I’d finish it by the end of January, but even that’s going to be a tough job. I’m going to be out every night this week as it turns out, so I probably won’t have the time to work on it until the weekend at the earliest.

FYI, my weeknight schedule for this week is as follows:

1. Monday – Mystery writer’s group
2. Tuesday – SF writer’s group
3. Wednesday – Meeting with a friend so she can return several DVDs she borrowed from me
4. Thursday – Helping my parents move a dresser out of one of their rental properties in time for the new renter, who’s moving in less than two weeks from now.

I’d like to fool myself into thinking that today proves I’ll be able to be productive when I get home from these things this week, but I know that I’ll be much more tired than I was today. Maybe I will have the energy at some point to proof another thirty or forty pages, but I’m not going to set myself up for disappointment that way.