Drawing from the Well
Scenes Arranged: 8
Total Scenes: 118
The last chapter before the First Plot Point/Key Event is in place. Hopefully today I’ll be able to dive into the two chapters that are going to kick off the conflict in earnest. My head-friends are about to get thrown for a loop.
Also, I rearranged the plot points for a couple of characters and am so much more settled now. They make more sense this way and I’m able to condense several characters’ unique movements/reactions into a single chapter, making it punch that much more. I can’t wait!
Filling the Well
Perelandra: 86%
The Only Harmless Great Thing: 14%
Making progress! I got a lot of time to listen to Perelandra yesterday and it is climbing to its conclusion. Then there’s only one more book in the series!
Polishing the Well
Last night, I took my daughter to an impromptu carnival. It was her idea but I went with it and it was so much fun. She rode all the rides and was beaming the entire time. Meanwhile, I was on the ground grabbing pictures of all of it. This is one of my favorites. That was her face the entire time. So much fun. This ties in with Well Chat, but we’ll get there.
In other news, our son is home from his big trip. He had a great time and he’s worn out from the travel. We’re glad to have him home and get back to a little normalcy around here.
Well Chat
Taking Back Your Time
This is an important subject. By a show of hands, how many people feel like they don’t have enough time?
That’s what I thought. Me too. Pretty much every day, I feel like I don’t have enough time to get everything done. A lot of this stems from my recent overactivity at work, but I have felt this way to some degree for a long time.
I started reading an article called Happiness by a literal happiness researcher name Ashley Whillans. I didn’t even know that was a thing. She went into great detail about the fallacy and pitfall of time-money trade-offs. The long and the short of it is that people who would trade money for time are often happier by a significant margin than those who sacrifice their time for money.
What this boils down to is are you more willing to work more and stress over how much money is coming in and going out or pay someone to handle less-desirable tasks to give you more time with friends, family, and leisure activities?
Sounds like a no-brainer for most of us, I’m sure. But really think about this. Assuming a fair price, how much time would you free up if you paid someone to clean your house? Mow your lawn? Deliver your groceries? Are you willing to use online programs like HelloFresh and Blue Apron? For you, is there a stigma attached to any of that?
For me, there isn’t. I stress about time and money all the time. I have MANY competing desires: work success, time with my kids, dating my wife, reading all the books, watching all the shows and movies, listening to all the music, writing all the books, working out, traveling, etc. It’s a lot of things we want to do. Time is our scarcest commodity. We all only get 24 hours a day.
So here are some of my tips to help you get some extra time. I’ve heard many people call their time spent commuting their “screen time” (as in windscreen). Audiobooks are a huge asset in my war against my TBR. I’ve found two great ways to engage these: Audible, which is a paid service with nearly unlimited book availability, and Hoopla, which is a free app that hooks into your library card but only has the audiobooks available to your libraries in the area. Hoopla has been great for me. I’ve listened to some books I was dying to read and some I never would have picked up. I also use this when I’m working to get some reading in, especially when I’m waiting for reports to run.
Another is the idea of stealing time, which I have mentioned in passing a couple times today. If I can take a few minutes to read on my Kindle app while I wait for reports to run or while I’m waiting for a meeting to start and I’m already transitioning between projects, I will. If I can squeeze some time in for a more-pleasurable activity while I wait for something else to happen, I will. Yesterday was a prime example. My daughter wanted me to take her to the carnival while my wife picked up our son from the airport. What else are we going to do, sit at home bored? No way! That seems silly. So we went and had a great time and made some memories (a critical activity with kids, the making of memories is).
The last tip I have for this is something I started only today as I walked out to take my son to school. He’s a junior and so I take him to school typically just before dawn. Today, I stepped out the door, locked it, stopped, and looked up. Where we live, we have more stars than where I grew up because we’re further from a major city. It isn’t the Arctic, but it is beautiful. Taking that moment to look up and acknowledge not just nature, not just the majesty of God’s creation, but also our relative smallness in this unfathomable universe. The fact that we are seeing light from stars that are so large and so far away that they’re already dead boggles the mind. That our own sun has so much raw power that it will outlive the human race by billions of years even before it swells and consumes the Earth itself.
Okay, that got a little morbid.
My point is take a moment and look around at all the things that were created, crafted, and placed JUST because they are beautiful, creative, and unique. They are there whether you see them or not, so give God some credit for the incredible creation that is our world.
And relax. You only get 24 hours in a day. Spend some of them making yourself happy and peaceful.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG