Self-employment has its privileges

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The view from the office right now. Nice eh?

Unfortunately, I'm not doing anything terribly creative, just writing up ads for tomorrow's Craigslist postings. I have two days of dedicated writing time this week. The rest of my life is consumed with condo selling. With any luck, the place should be out of my hands (and into my realtor's) next week and back into the writing life I go. In the meantime, I blog.

Update #1: South Beach Phase 1, or who knew I ate so much bread?

You never know how much junk you consume until it's three o'clock on a Tuesday and you're contemplating snack food. Ordinarily, I would have gone for one of the following: peanut-butter sandwich crackers, a 100 calorie pack of Cheese Nips, or two pieces of "whole wheat" bread (with butter and strawberry jelly and a glass of milk, of course). Obviously, all of these were off limits so I spent the week of Phase 1 dutifully counting out my 15 almonds or taking a handful of cherry tomatoes from the fridge. And you know, it worked. Also, I think I broke my boredom eating habit. I think. It's only been two weeks. The jury may still be out on that one.

If nothing else, doing Phase 1 of SBD helped me realize two very important things. Number 1: I ate/eat way too much sugar and flour. Number 2: It's not terribly difficult to prepare a meal that is without these two ingredients. In the end I think I lost about 6 pounds. The book estimated losses between 8 and 12. I would have been happier with 12, but oh well. I'm going to continue on into Phase 2, but as the holidays get closer, I may opt for less South Beach and more, "eat as little starchy stuff as possible." We'll revisit the idea in a few weeks.

Update #2, The big 3-2, or at the stroke of midnight the New Yorker will call and want every short story I've ever written.

Yeah. Didn't happen. Didn't expect it to except in that dreamy way that I wish literary journals would suddenly call and say they'd like to publish me. You know, without ever submitting anything.

But the big day came and went with as little hoopla as possible. Hubs and I had brunch with some friends, then browsed the Domain, and then had dinner with his folks. It was a nice, low-key birthday. I did feel a little bit melancholy about the idea of hitting thirty two and being knee deep in dieting and condo selling and not yet able to focus on my writing. In fact, I had a bit of a temper tantrum this morning when I realized that I had yet another day of cleaning the condo and endless non-writing-related errands to attend to. I feel a little like an imposter, ya know? All that talk about writing full time and two weeks into it, I'm still dragging my feet and doing a lot of not writing things. It's kind of like I replaced the job with all the unrelated errands: the condo, the diet, cleaning, etc.

That realization led me to establish at least two writing days this week. As for today, if I can't give my all to writing yet, I can at least not focus on it in a pretty place.