What Is Normal?

I suspect there is a trick to long holiday weekends that make you think you’re going to accomplish boatloads of things included on your to-do list, but instead suck you into a vortex of “we still have time.”

For us, we’ve managed daily walks since my arrival, each one over 2 miles. Kyra is getting old enough that sometimes she’s a little slower than her typically spry self, and really worried me last Sunday night when I actually had to carry her a couple blocks to give her weakening hips a rest. But she has a friend in Dr. Julie, and we were able to get an appointment for her this week, so last night we went for over 3 miles for the first time in a long time. Over the course of the past week, that means we’ve clocked 17.2 miles together. For once, I more than managed my exercise goals.

I also managed my school goals. I’m all up-to-date with my assignments.

But that pesky sense of “so much time”… I decided to go back to the beginning of my manuscript to get a good sense of how I’d started… see if I could add some tension… some foreshadowing… clean up early issues. I got about halfway through the process of adding and deleting (otherwise known as editing </hah>), and ended up with a grand total of four more words than I’d started with.

.<

I think I’m still looking for normal. On the other hand, I did manage to pull together a one-page description of our house to see if any friends or friends-of-friends would want to rent from us for a while starting in August. (If you know of anyone in the Milwaukee area interested in a cozy Cape Cod with a fenced yard perfect for furbabies, feel free to message me!) We’re also starting to see houses listed in the northern Virginia area that would work for our purposes, so making arrangements for an August move is starting to feel like real progress.

Tonight, then, my hubs sent me the link to an article about specific things consistently happy people do that make them different from everyone else. I wonder why it’s so much easier for me to express gratitude, cultivate optimism, and practice kindness when I’m with him as opposed to when we’re apart. Is it one of those mysteries of love? I may have to figure out how to incorporate that into its own story. On the other hand, committing to goals (another one of those happy-inducers from that article’s list) is a big part of the ROW80 experience, so I’ll encourage you once again to go see how my cohorts are handling their goals.

This week I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing fiction since I’ll be traveling half of Sunday (with a long layover in Atlanta, so no guarantee of arriving as expected) to once more return to Virginia–and I better have all my classwork done before I hit the road otherwise I’ll miss my deadlines. So I won’t make any guarantees about a blog post next week… just keep an eye on my handy word counters in the right rail. Until I next post, I’ll be working on making those happy habits more consistent, too.