A shiny thing day…
Long ago, I started calling days when you can’t concentrate or where the least little thing causes you to go off on a tangent, shiny thing days. Sort of like cats who chase the light from a flashlight all around a dark room or the way animals just go after every shiny thing they see because it catches their attention: shiny thing days are those where there is no straight lines from task a to task b.
Today started okay. But suddenly I realized it was a shiny thing day. How did I know? Well, my first clue was when I opened the cupboard to get my vitamins and instead saw the cereal. So, I got down the cereal and realized I needed a bowl. Opened the other cupboard to get a bowl noticed the coffee. So, opened the fridge to get water into the coffee pot so I could start it. Got out the water and flipped open the top and poured. Flipped it closed and snapped on the machine. (Note: I haven’t mentioned putting the grounds in the coffee machine.)
Well, the whole day has gone like that. It took me four trips up the stairs to get the dirty clothes before I actually got them down to the laundry area. I don’t want to even count how long it took to actually get them in the machine and started. Suffice it to say that in between email got read, some even got answered, mail got picked up, plants got watered, knitting got done, interviews got written up and sent off, articles got formatted, html tags got entered, news items got sorted and put up.
However, being a shiny thing day — no proofreading or copyediting was done. As interesting as it might be to find out what things would look like afterwards, I decided to give it a pass today. Maybe housework was invented to keep people out of mischief on shiny thing days. In spite of it all, tasks got done. They just took a lot longer with a lot of interesting side trips and I guess in the end that just makes the journey even more interesting.