Gearing up to stand down

*sniff, sniff*

What’s that smell? It smells like…quitting time!

{Angels singing, confetti, Light of Hope streaming down from on high, unicorns frisking through fields of buttercups}

This has been one of the hardest weeks on record since I went back to work. I have had a ton of motivational issues, not helped one little bit by Captain Adventure being sick, and the Job Monitor {dramatic music, cape, kindly-wise look on face} thing has been really draining. People keep saying things I don’t understand about processes I know nothing about, and then when I say, “Uuuuuuuh,” they say things like, “Oh, don’t worry, you don’t need to know how it works – I’m saying telling you so you’ll know.”

OK. Thanks, thanks for that. I’ll go ahead and file that away, shall I?

This weekend’s plans changed rather dramatically thanks to Captain Adventure’s strep throat; although technically his doctor said he would no longer be contagious as of tonight, I didn’t want to go anywhere anyway prefer not to take chances with these things.

So instead of attending social events, I’m going to spend the weekend alternating knitting for babies with taking care of one of my Special Projects: Paper Elimination.

It is positively disgraceful how much paper I’ve got cluttering up my life. It’s no wonder I can never find anything – there’s so much ‘anything’ to flip through, it’s a wonder we haven’t all died of infected paper cuts.

I have a scanner, people, and I’m not afraid to use it. I’m going to be going through all my paper, scanning anything I might actually need and the shredding / recycling / otherwise getting rid of as much paper as humanly possible.

One other thing I want to do this weekend is work on our finances. There are two times when I lose money faster than a drunken tourist in Vegas: When I’m feeling wealthy (I can blow through a bonus check [and then some] before the ink is dry on the deposit slip), and when I’m on budgetary auto-pilot.

Every so often, it really helps to go back to Square 1 and look at everything as if I were just starting out. Try to forget what I thought I was doing and go at it as if I never had a plan.

Sometimes, I come to exactly the same conclusion – and that’s great!

Other times, I realize that something has changed along the way, and the deal isn’t as good as it used to be, or that there are better opportunities out there.

I’m not a person who prays that $DEITY will drop a million bucks in my lap. But I do pray, darn near daily, that I will be awakened to all the blessings and opportunities that surround me, each and every day.

And also, that I can fend off my lazy long enough to make a grab for them.

Because sitting on my ever-expanding rear end saying, “Wow, yeah, that might have been a really cool deal…” is, uh, a little less than helpful…