escape yourself and gravity

Today while I was emptying a trash can in the community recycling Dumpster, a spider tried to eat my face. I dropped the trash can.

IN the Dumpster. So there I am freaking out about this rodent-sized spider, AND I've lost my trash can. But I was wearing cowboy boots.

So I climbed halfway into that damn Dumpster, kicked the spider's ass, and got my trash can back. You think I'm kidding. But I'm not.

I honestly can't believe everything I've accomplished this weekend.  I think either the Zoloft kicked in or I kicked my own ass into gear.  Things I've done since Friday evening:

• Went through both closets and four of my five dresser drawers and got rid of three trashbags full of clothes.  Dad dropped them off at Trinity Mission for me yesterday.
  
• Three loads of laundry
  
• Got all my exercise clothes washed and loaded into my gym bag.
  
• Biked several miles on the West Lafayette park system's bike trails with Mom.
  
• Hiked at Celery Bog and saw a green heron, a kingfisher, and lots of the usual waterfowl.
  
• Got my night-elf warrior up to level 37 and fished in the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza.  Didn't win though.
  
• Started working on new graphics for this year's cm_exchange--which will be opening for sign-ups this month!
  
• Cleaned off my desk.
  
• Found DVD #1 of North and South (BBC one) and the padlock I spent 20 minutes looking for yesterday.
  
• Balanced my checkbook and paid all my bills--and even had money left over!
  
• Revised 1500 words of my original novel, including writing a brand new scene with elements of two of the old scenes.
  
• Rediscovered my recliner.

And now I'm off to bed by 10:30!  One of these days I'll manage to get my bedtime moved back to 9:30 on work nights, but 10:30 is pretty good!  G'night, all!

In a lot of ways I feel like I've been in a several-months-long slump in productivity, life-wise. I've been managing to pay my bills mostly on time, but aside from that, very little has happened as far as accomplishing my personal life goals since NaNoWriMo in November.

Last week I started attacking the Room of Doom (the spare upstairs bedroom, aka our junk room) and have accomplished a LOT in terms of cleaning, sorting out books to sell, throwing away old papers and toys, filing financial information and book research, and pulling out clothes to donate.

Today I actually logged in to the USAJobs website and began updating my resume for the first time in a year and a half. My federal tax refund allowed me to start catching up on my student loan, which means I can start the FBI application process without feeling ashamed of myself (because one of the automatic disqualifiers is if you have defaulted on a Federally-insured loan, and while I wasn't in default, I was behind).

I also told astraea36 that I would have a brand new draft of Shaper, the first in my series of original urban fantasy novels, for her to read by the time we meet in Vegas this April. Y'all will note that April is not too far away. I've let her think I'm working away at that, when the truth is that I've only done a little bit of the work needed. At megburden's endorsement, I'm using Holly Lisle's One Pass Revision method, and I've completed Part One, which led me to discover a new subtheme to the novel that I'd barely hinted at, as well as made me realize I want to elaborate on the other subthemes a little. This weekend I am going to buckle down and get through at least the novel's Part One of the manuscript slog. No matter what.

Are there other things I want to accomplish? Well, I need to start brushing up on my Spanish. And I've really fallen off in submitting stories to magazines. Once I finish the novel revision, I need to start looking into representation for it. And the Room of Doom isn't clean yet. Not to mention while I was getting my foot worked on, I fell out of the Couch-to-5k program and will need to start that again in order to be able to pass the FBI's physical requirements.

All in all, I've got a ways to go. But at least I'm starting to recover the will to actually do it.

Today I did lots of stuff! I did a loud of laundry, cleaned my desk, filed all my 2008 bills, paid almost all of February's bills, and got the last installment of our four-part series betaed and posted. (I had already betaed the fic, but somewhere along the line lost the printout, darn it. So I had to start from scratch.) I also fixed Mom's cell phone contact list for her and gave my uncle half an hour of advice on buying a new laptop for his job. All in all, I feel like I've accomplished a lot.

Of course, I have to go to work tomorrow, so that sense of accomplishment isn't going to last very long.....