We all know I’m a creature of habit and it’s safe to say that having an invalid dog has generated quite a few changes to a schedule that had been popping along happily for the last fifteen months. After three days, I think we finally hit on a new routine that might be manageable, especially tomorrow with me going back to work. The killer is that the two dogs have to be separated to do everything that they use to do together… eating, going out, hanging out in the living room, everything. The problem, of course, is that where feeding the dogs use to be a plural act, it’s now singular, in that I have to feed one dog, take them out, and crate them before repeating the process with the other. A twenty minute morning routine is now something closer to 45 minutes and creeps up towards an hour when it involves breaking out the ice packs. Of course I’ll keep doing it, knowing that the first two weeks of the healing process are the worst and it will get better over time. Even so, I’ll be much happier when I have a pair of dogs again instead of two dogs who just happen to be living in the same house. Until then it looks like I’ll be setting a 4AM alarm to get it done before heading to work. Yeah, tomorrow morning should be a real treat.
Tag Archives: creature of habit
Breaking routine…
Going for at least one post a day is a personal goal around here. I like to think I hit the mark more often than not unless there’s some intervening traumatic life event that gets in the way of sitting down and knocking out a few hundred words. Looking at the next couple of days, though, I’m just giving everyone a heads up that it might be quiet around here this week. Getting up early, driving to Baltimore, and getting home late for the next four days is going to put a squeeze on free time… and since writing occupies a big block of available time in the evenings, that’s pretty much what’s going to end up getting squeezed off the daily itinerary.
Being a dedicated creature of habit, you can well imagine how excited I am to have my finely honed scheduled screwed with for the rest of the week… and given my track record for tolerating dumb things in a training environment, I’m going to consider it a win as long as I manage to avoid getting thrown out or picking a fist fight (not necessarily in that order). Otherwise, I’d just like to get this week over as expeditiously as possible and get back to our regularly scheduled activities.
The only good thing I can think of when it comes to being stuck in training for the week is that it gives me a whole new crop of people to observe and make snarky comments about. I might not get to post these little gems right away, but rest assured I’ll be taking copious notes and the whole story will come out. Eventually. Unless the room we’re in has wifi of course, and then it’s game on from the time I walk through the door in the morning.
No surprises…
In the two and a half years that I’ve been writing here at WordPress, I’d hate to guess how many times I’ve “admitted” to being a creature of habit. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t at least once a month. Maybe that in itself has gotten to be a bit of a habit, but that’s not really the point. Because I’m a creature of habit, I like having a schedule. I like knowing that the alarm clock is going to ring at the same time every day, that lunch is going to happen at more or less the same time every morning, and that I’m going to walk out the door at more or less the same time every afternoon. When some unforeseen circumstance throws that schedule out of whack, I tend to get vicerally annoyed by it, even when it doesn’t show. I’m sure there’s some deep seated psychological reason for it, but I’ve never been curious enough to try figuring it out. Making sure things go according to plan always seemed like a better use of time to me.
Of course when you’re a simple cog in the machine, most of your schedule ends up really being decided by someone or something well beyond your own sphere of control. When that happens, there’s really not much more to to but grin and bear it no matter how much you’re seething in the inside. Not that I would ever seethe over some minor detail like that, of course. I’m a pretty simple guy to motivate. Keep me fed, watered, and on schedule and all is right with the world. Start dinking with any one of the three and I can get downright surly. I should be enjoying what’s left of this Sunday afternoon, but in the back of my mind I’m already vaguely annoyed by tomorrow’s schedule being shot to hell before I ever leave the house. Around 4:00 tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to need someone to remind me that snarky comments and senior staff rarely go well together. I should probably just consider myself lucky that this kind of blown schedule is a rarity… but I’ll leave that for the glass-half-full types. Putting things in perspective seems to make them feel better. Strangely enough, bitching about it online seems to have the same effect on me.
My incredible shrinking attention span…
No one reading this is going to be surprised to hear me say that I’m a creature of habit. That’s one of the problems I’ve always had with writing. As long as I make a conscious effort to carve out time to do it every day, all is right with the world. Unfortunately, it’s perilously easy to quickly slide into the habit of not writing. For the record, being a not writer is far, far easier than being a writer. Because I’m fundamentally hardwired to seek the path of least resistance, not writing anything on Saturday quickly turned into letting it slide for the next two days as well. It would be a simple thing to let it slide for the rest of the week, for another month, a year maybe, all because it stopped being part of my routine for a few days. Whether it’s blogging, churning out pulp fiction, or the great American novel, writing is an act of self discipline, which is another skill I have yet to fully realize.
When the sun’s out, a few dozen odds and ends need doing, the television, a list of books you’ve been meaning to read, and rum punch on the deck rear their heads, it’s hard to overcome the sheer number of things competing for your time and attention. For me at least, it’s easy to write in the winter. It’s gray and cold and frankly there’s not nearly as much competing for attention. With a cold rain falling, it’s nothing to churn out a couple thousand words in an afternoon. Once the weather turns, I’m lucky to muddle through two or three hundred, before my incredible shrinking attention span hurls me off in another direction. At least I can admit I have a problem. That’s the first step, right?
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