the procrastinating girl

Spring Cleaning

It's late.  I had intended to start this post earlier, but my house was bombarded with a relentless electrical storm along with golf-ball-sized hail.  Apparently, spring is here.  Aside from the petrifying dose of mother nature, how else can you note the change of seasons?  This morning pre-Grape Nuts, I began to attempt to declutter.  It's truly an annual phenomenon.  And I have to move slowly or I'm liable to pull something.  I started upstairs.  Back in December for Zoe's birthday party, we had moved all the playroom junk up to the office.  And. there. it. has. remained.  The path from door to desk chair had become a life-threatening obstacle course.  Dramatic?  Have you ever mistakenly stepped barefoot on a wooden block?  Oh, it's a world of hurt.  As I was making 'keep' and 'give away' piles, I found a white plastic bag from Target.  Hardly unusual.   This one contained school supplies.  At the beginning of the year, I had bought different notebooks and folders, not knowing exactly what kind Sydney needed and assuming I would return the extras.  Right.  Of course these now unreturnable items can be used in a second by my songwriter-poet-artists-to-be.  I wish I could say the same for the toddler size 7 shoes I found in a bag next to my dresser.  Any takers?

It Snowed Today

I really can't come up with a better title than that.  As you know, I strive to keep the content thematic here on TPG.  I guess Mother Nature clearly has no desire to make the cut.  She is obviously not a procrastinator.  Snow in October?  That's just absurd.  The line in the sand for what I would designate 'appallingly early' for the first sight of snow is any time around my birthday, November 18th.  Even then, I don't usually have the misfortune of welcoming in my own new year with a dusting of flakes.  One year, I can't recall which (the best I can say is that it was pre-children), my husband and I headed up to Vermont for the weekend.  I remember we were having dinner at a very cozy, fireplace-y kind of wood-paneled place when we looked out the window and saw a white layer coating the street.  But of course, that was Vermont.  We weren't sure it counted.  Today's snow was far more bizarre.  It's New York.  In the middle of a climate crisis.  Obviously.  Damn, it's cold.

Blood Simple

If there's anything in life I put off whenever possible, it's going to the doctor.  Clearly, this isn't smart.  Nor is it high on anyone's list of preferred activities, but for me it ranks right under crashing the Palin family reunion.  I have a sordid history of passing out cold upon the threat of a medical procedure.  And needles?  Forget it.  Smelling salts.  The alternative was I had to have something sugary to bring me back to earth.  My Ob/Gyn in the city gave me juice boxes.  That worked well, although one time it was a Five Alive-y drink that contained banana (gross!), so while I was no longer catatonic, I was indeed nauseous.  I know, I am too much fun.  But things have improved with time.  I have learned the secrets of deep breathing and relaxation.  I can manage my anticipation anxiety.  I have given birth without incident.  Twice.  But this morning, for the first time in quite awhile, I had to have blood drawn.  And it had to be today, in time for an appointment tomorrow.  I was nervous, but I got it done.  And I didn't even need a lollipop.

Black Snake Moan

I arrived home from Vermont last night totally fried.  The girls fought in the car the whole way home and we hit intermittent traffic and bad weather.  I was ecstatic at the sight of my mailbox.  But in case you didn't hear the screaming from Cedar Hill Road, I was greeted by an absolutely enormous black snake that had gotten itself stuck in the fencing of our garden.  I can handle most things creepy and crawly.  There are bugs all over this place that I regularly pick up bare-handed.  I won't touch frogs, but watch them jump across my yard on a daily basis.  Ok, once a mouse did reduce me to a broom-wielding mess atop the couch squealing much like the mouse itself.  But this snake?  Holy mackerel.  Indiana Jones would have gotten the hell out of there.  I probably should have called animal control right then to deal with it, get more information and at least make the girls feel better.  They made it clear they had every intention of having nightmares that night.  But I decided to turn my back, head back into the house and pray for daylight.  When it came, ding dong, the snake was dead.  Let's just hope he was an only child.

So Close

I woke up this morning with every intention of buying the last few doorknobs we need for the upstairs of the house.  I mean it!  We had nothing else to do.  Nowhere to go.  No one to see.  Obviously calling down to make sure my three locking Baldwin Fillmore satin nickel crystal knobs were in stock would be smart.  So I did.  I waited on hold for an eternity (actual time: about eight minutes) impressed with myself for how rationally I was handling this process.  Finally, Pat somebody answered.  The knobs are in-house and being held for me.  Great Pat, I'll be right down.  My name?  Yes, that's N-G-E-L.  Rhymes with?  Nothing.  As I went to grab my keys, the sky turned black.  Jet.  It was as if the earth was ending.  Then the actual storm came.  It rained, hailed and monsooned as I imagine it does in the Phillippines.  We lost a tree and the power flickered.  My plans of leaving the house were clearly washed out.  So I didn't officially get the job done, but now there are three doorknobs sitting on Pat's desk at Home Depot Expo in New Rochelle with my name on them.  Literally.  I know, a lot of good that does me.

The New Math

I'm amazed at how much I've come to depend on science and technology and still, at times, what minor influence it's had on my daily life.  Yes, I could chat online with my cousins in Israel right now or watch one fabulously dull baseball game while recording another (who do I have to thank for that?).  Well, apparently, at least one analytical brain has been working diligently to solve the riddle that is procrastination.  His name is Dr. Piers Steel and last year he came up with an actual equation (the Temporal Motivational Theory) that he claims is the explanation to why people procrastinate. 

It looks like this:

Utility = E x V / I x D

(Utility) is the desirability of the task.  (E) is the expectancy a person has of succeeding at a task.  (V) is the value of completing the task.  (I) is its immediacy and (D) is the person’s sensitivity to delay.

According to this model, and Dr. Steel, the more impulsive you are, the more likely you are to procrastinate.   Hmm.  I am not the drop-everything-and-jet-to-Europe kind of girl.  Nor do I fill my cart with all those little items placed specifically at check-out to lure the weak of pocketbook.  There are no Tic-Tacs in my bag.  So maybe I'm an aberration.  Or Dr. Steel's research could be way off-base.  But I could never break the bad news.  It took him ten years to finish.

Stormy Weather

June is busy.  I feel deadlines, thank-you's, birthdays (Hi Matt!) swirling around me in danger of going unnoticed.  It's a little nerve-wracking.  For weeks now, I've been meaning to call B-Dry Waterproofing Systems.  They install interior french drains in basements and, yes, their logo is a bumblebee dressed like some kind insect-ified superhero, cape and all.  My first encounter with Doug, the very nice fellow who owns the franchise, was at our old house.  We lived on a lovely pond, which to me meant an influx of fascinating wildlife, but to Doug meant "high water table".  We had regular floods, including one New Year's Eve that destroyed most of my freelance writing clips and, of course, connection to my former working life and the outside world (clearly, no psychological damage done either).  Enter B-Dry.  When we moved last year, there was no such history of water, yet just three weeks later, our area was hit with what is still just being called "The Noreaster."  We were flooded yet again, this time with most of our belongings in the basement.  Hello, Doug?  Judy in the office actually recognized my name, as people often do when they don't at first mistake it for the word "original", and realized I was a follow-up customer.  The Latin term for this is a "self-referral."  But Doug's estimate this time was just too high to pull the trigger.  Well, things have dried up for Doug (sorry, I had to), and he's having a sale.  But only through July, which apparently is soon.  So, I should call now.  We've already had two angry storms this week and the forecast is iffy.

Time Warp

It's a little counterintuitive that someone prone to procrastinating would be completely Type A about being on time.  But I am.  Anyone who has had to meet me anywhere knows this.  Just ask my friend Linda who I missed at her house several days ago.  I mean, we had said 1:30... not 1:34.  The part where my procrastinating self conflicts with my punctual self caught up with me last night.  We had a power outage, just because the wind blew too hard, leaving me without a functioning clock upstairs.  How?  Here's the embarrassing truth.  I've had the clock on my nightstand since 7th grade.  It's cheesy pink plastic, has moving hands and plays an electronica version of 'Here Comes the Sun'.  The batteries ran out last year and I still haven't replaced them.  No, I don't think I wake up at 11:23am, but I realize it's kind of odd.  I did buy a shiny, old-fashioned-looking alarm clock as its replacement, but had to stick it in the bathroom because the ticking drove me nuts.  That one konked out last month.  It now reads 7:38.  My running watch, which I used to wear religiously, has been banished to the bathroom as well, untouched since daylight savings time.  It's still one hour off. The last timepieces we have upstairs are powered by, yes, electricity and were left blank by the storm.   So there I was, left in a chronological vacuum.  And for the first time in a long time, I fell asleep simply because I was tired.

The Om Front

I have to admit there's a big part of me that wishes I could be one of those supercrunchy women who grows their own herbs and bakes their own bread. The other part thinks Justin Timberlake is a musical genius. And anyway my real regret is yoga. Over a year ago at a silent auction for my daughters' school, I won, for a very small sum, a half-hour private yoga lesson. I left that night with a black tank top bearing the instructor's insignia and instructions to call to set up my one-on-one tutorial. Well, the tank top gets a lot of action. It hits the treadmill regularly and today got screamed at by Herman the badass kickboxing teacher. But I never called about my lesson. Actually, I never even bothered getting the number of the yoga instructor. Over time it slowly moved to the bottom of the list (under doorknobs?) and was forgotten. Then, just this morning, at my biofeedback appointment where I am supposed to meditate my chronic migraines away, my doctor 'strongly recommended' I pursue the practice of yoga. Think I will make the call now?

The Culprit

So it is a bit of a cliche that I launched a blog about my inability to complete simple tasks and then proceeded to abandon it for several days. BUT unlike most other cases of performance anxiety, this time it wasn't completely my fault. Just after I went live with TPG, my router fried and I lost Web access. For me, this is the equivalent of being sent to Biosphere 2 (minus the fascinating ecological research). Good times. Thankfully, I am back up and running thanks to my new best friend, the Actiontec MI424WR, which I'm sure will last as long as its predecessor... until the week after its warranty expires.