Glimpse In A Mirror

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
(Or, I Realize How Bad My Rut Really Is)

How long does it take you to stop calling it your *new* computer? I just realized that I no longer talk about my *new* computer, only calling it my computer. I got a LOT of memory, and I'm running at 86% empty, so I don't stop very often to clean out folders. But yesterday, feeling the urge to do some organizing, I went through a couple of folders. Mostly, I wanted to get rid of things that I don't need any more, and move other things to new folders where they really belong. I spent about 45 minutes on this task, and after throwing away a lot of files, I'm still sitting at 86% empty.

One of the things I found, however, stopped me in my tracks. It is a huge to-do list that I made up in May 2001. I remember back then, I was feeling like this huge black cloud was following me around, and I thought that if I made a list of the things I was thinking I should do, it would help me to reduce the black cloud feeling. It was a good theory, but in reality, I didn't get that many things crossed off the list. Well, to be honest, I had nearly 100 things on the list, everything from paying bills, to shipping a box to the UK, to cleaning the truck, to figuring out how to get cable for my upstairs TV, to adding weather stripping to the french doors. To make myself feel better, I didn't delete items when they were done, I moved them over to the second column on the page so I could see how much I had done. Originally, I thought these were things I could do in one week (HA!) but I used the list for a couple of weeks before giving up on it.

Now here is the really weird part. This list is 1 year old, and when I read through it, after all of this time, 80% of the items on the list are still items waiting to be done. I can't believe it. I was able to mark only a few more as finished. I feel like I've learned something very important about myself... that I really don't get around to the things I really don't want to do.

So, feeling optimistic, I updated the list to match my current to-do items this week of this year. And I'm determined that I'm going to get at least half of them knocked off in the next month. Yep, and I'm going to finish my taxes in the same month, also. (I told you I'm an optimist.)