One Sunny Day

It looks like we will have one dry sunny day this week - it is today.  My garden is calling.  I am torn in different directions this morning with what to do with my remaining 2.5 hours - I want to keep my momentum up with my writing, am overwhelmed by my messy house to the point where I can't take it anymore, and my garden is calling.   

My desk faces a window, not right in front of me, but off to the side.  Somehow the window, which is too high for my baby to touch, has accumulated layers of fingerprints.  Who is touching my window with sticky fingers?  It is possible he could touch the lower window if he stands on his stool, which is his preoccupation lately.  But no way did he touch the upper part of the window without an accomplice. 

The outside world would be more of a distraction this morning if I could see it clearly.  On top of this, I am not sure I can easily make my way through the maze of my garage to find my gardening tools without hurting my foot on the concrete floor.  I like writing outside, but my chairs aren't set up yet and I would be too distracted by my gardening task list today to write outside. 

I will try to wait until this afternoon to garden, to clear the debris from the flower and vegetable beds, to pull the weeds that are already flourishing, and set up the outside chairs.  I have been waiting for this one warm day for so long - it would be silly to pass it up entirely.  So I will make a deal with myself to write one chapter - just one - maybe a quick one, clean that window and whatever else I can finish before my babes comes home from his morning school.  Then we can garden together, which will be super fun.  And if we can't get to the tools, we could at least go for a bike ride or play on our little playground in our backyard garden.

Obstacles to Writing

There is no worse obstacle to writing for me than distraction.  And no worse distraction than a dirty desk.  My desk has become a magnet for clutter.  When I sat down this morning to try to write this is what I found:

• several pictures my kids drew over the years that I intended to frame
• my e-Reader, totally dead and without its charger
• a Print Shop CD that I never installed and probably never will
• a box of GRE vocabulary cards that were mocking me
• a stack of used and new Franklin planner pages - do I really need that when I have Outlook?
• a Franklin planner filled with unused pages from September
• a really cool Christmas card from last year with a gingerbread man that morphs into a snowman cookie if you move it
• The Iliad
• a bookmark that I quickly inserted into The Iliad
• headphones for the Rosetta Stone French course that I've been meaning to install
• several pens
• a stack of journals from the last two years that I have intended to look through to pull out story ideas but haven't
• a piece of paper with my ex-husband's email address on it
• "Tuning Zone-Based Policy Firewall Denial-Of-Service Protection" printout - obviously not mine
• the warranty info for my tv
• a tv, which I regret I chose to put on my desk
• scissors, two screwdrivers, and a half-dozen power cords (still not the one for my dead e-Reader)
• two large pen holders filled but with no pens
• a stapler
• the reading glasses I have been searching for
• a pad of graph paper
• three drawing books for children and a pad of drawing paper
• two coasters
• a dirty coffee cup
• a lot of loose poems
• printouts from the printer, mostly garbage
• random receipts
• a remote control
• a notebook just for poetry drafts
• a stack of papers I need to look through
• the power cord for my digital camera
• an empty plastic report cover
• my current writing journal
• laptop and laptop accessories
• lamp
• two black mesh dividers for bills with no bills

I removed everything from my desk, polished it, and put back the things that actually belong there.  The rest I left on the floor, my bed, or my dresser (yes, spreading out the mess).  Now my desk is too clean.  I still can't seem to focus on what I wanted to write about and can't find the chapter I wanted to work on (my guess is it's in the stack on the floor).