A Distracted Mess

I have to admit, I have struggled today to write this blog post. It’s not even the one I had planned on writing. Today’s topic was supposed to be about compassion, but I find myself distracted by my surroundings and my long list of To-Organize. Everything around me is an excuse waiting to be grabbed and used to put off writing today. I even feel the lull of a nap invading my mind and trying to snap my eyelids like window blinds. I’ve convinced myself that I had to go to the bathroom twenty times just to get out of the chair and move somewhere other than in front of my computer. I’ve even whined to the girls about it while they are at work. Needless to say they weren’t very sympathetic and told me to get busy. So, I made lunch.

I also made another pot of coffee hoping the caffeine would kick start my brain. I still want to take a nap. In about an hour and a half the 9 year-old will be home and she will be distraction enough.

I hate these days. I’ve always dreamed of being a full time writer, working from home, spinning out yarn after yarn of fiction. However, now I’m surrounded by all of those tasks that need completed around the house and they are screaming at me full volume. It doesn’t help that I am boxed in by most of it.

I’ve shared how I am organizing my computer files, which means quite a bit of music files. We shuffled external drives a few times before settling on one and now iTunes has a spot for 20 copies of Love Shack where only one should be. Add to that the fact that all of the kids have used our computer to download and rip music and I have songs on there I have never heard of and wished I still hadn’t. Little by little, I have been listening to the songs and deleting the bad files, the duplicates, and that noise the kids call music. I started with 75,875 music files and since New Year’s Day have whittled it down to 60,395 and that is the first three letters of the alphabet!

Then I decided to sort through the photo albums and create slide shows for our digital picture frames. Well, that led to me wanting to scan all of our pictures and make them digital so we could enjoy them more than we do now while they are boxed up in the hall closet. Of course, that revealed to me that my children were about as good at photography as they were at selecting music. So we had to sort and scan all of those boxed pictures.

On top of that, and at the same time I might add, the girls and I decided to change the house around. It needed a facelift. After all, it had been like it was for over a year and we were tired of it. So we planned on starting at one room and working our way around one room at a time. Well, you’ve heard about good intentions, right? We started out on task but then realized that we couldn’t finish one room until we found out what would work in the other and that led to another and now we have furniture scattered around the house and what-nots stacked on counters and a garage overflowing with nonsense. Okay, the garage was always overflowing with nonsense, but now it’s worse, if you can imagine.

So, I’m distracted. I just want to get all of this chaos around me settled so that the Mess that is inside of me won’t be distracted by the mess around me. I am forcing myself into this chair and to type word after word while trying to keep the proverbial blinders on before the butterflies carry me away to another project.

And I still want a nap!

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