Calendar Girl

Well, I will have my holiday wrap up post later today as I am still sifting through the mountains of gifts and their attached packaging (oh, Al it is such a waste!) but right now I am trying to clear off my desk from all the paper that has piled up from the last month or so. I don't know about anyone else but my desk seems to be the first to go when all the organization I strive for goes off the rails. I suspect it is because my office is in the basement and has a nice handy door that can be quite easily, shut.

After I assured myself that I had not buried any bills or other papers that needed to be dealt with immediately i tackled my favorite year-end project, transferring all necessary info from my 2007 datebook to 2008. The purpose of this is make sure I remember birthdays, but it always ends up taking like an hour because i like to look at every single entry because it is the truest reflection of what i have accomplished in a year. When you are in my line of work no one is doing quarterly evaluations, there are no bonus meetings or being called into the boss' office if you screw up. So my datebook is the closest thing i have because my datebook runs my life. It holds not only my appointments, but also phone numbers, notations for recipes, web sites I like, events or locations I have been meaning to attend, books I want to read, confirmation numbers for all vacations, tracking all Olivia's various doctors and illnesses, etc. It is me.

I sometimes think that if someone wanted to know who I was, they could just read the blog, but all bloggers know that this is not true. Blog posts are only the parts of you that you hope will be funny to someone else, the stories that you call to tell your friends on the way home from work, the e-mail that you send because the picture is so cute. In April my blog was all about consumerism and my war with the IKEA, my date book shows a woman panicking about her daughter being smarter than she ever imagined that she would be since my datebook is covered with sites and books about what to do with your gifted child, there was no blog for when, it appears, that i spent weeks selecting the perfect birthday gift for Olivia, or trying to piece together my Irish heritage through my grandfather.

The hardest part of the datebook is getting to the end and realizing all the dates you had forgotten, all the things you took for granted, all the things you could have done better, that's why the first page of my new datebook always says something like: today I will try harder, today I will slow down, today i will smile at every little thing so I do not forget how lucky I am to get to start it over again.