Something awesome happened today. I woke up feeling happy and light. I grabbed a skirt out of my closet that I’d been feeling too ugly to wear and rocked it! I did my make-up and looked beautiful. I left the house feeling happy, pretty, and confident and looking forward to all my day was going to bring. I felt so good that I was afraid I had gone over the edge and become one of those obnoxiously happy people. There was a bounce in my step and a smile on my face that could not be hidden. No, nothing special happened to make me feel this way. It was just me. It felt amazing.

Today, I didn’t dread going to see people. Usually seeing people, even close friends and family is hard for me. I dread the “how are you doing”  or the “are things going better for you” questions that are inevitable. I usually either have to lie and smile, gently change the topic, or share how things really are and risk another person’s pity or uncomfortable silence. I know no one intends to be rude or insensitive. But chronic pain, mystery medical conditions, and stressful work are not topics anyone wants to talk about or hear about. When that’s all I could see about my life, it was hard to face people.

Hoping more of these days are coming my way!

Now, on to business. Here’s a brief update on my remaining daily missions and this week’s weekly mission.

Clean out my work email

So Friday I had a tooth impolitely yanked out of my mouth in preparation for an implant. They ended up not being able to do the implant because I didn’t have enough bone. So they crammed some bone graft in there and sent me away with a hole in my mouth. Ouch. This put a kink in my evening plans. I spent much of the rest of the night sleeping or high on Vicodin. That didn’t lend itself well to cleaning out my work email. So I did that on Saturday instead. But I didn’t get nearly far enough on that massive project. I have something like 10k emails in my inbox and 17k emails in my sent email. This was definitely not a 5 minute task. Maybe 5 minutes, 2x day, for the next two months. Anyone out there with tips on how to manage one’s email inbox? I started reading the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Apparently, there a bunch of tips on how to more efficiently manage email. Here’s hoping I find one that works for me.

Clean off dresser and nightstand

This feels like a task that I do every other week. Again, a result of the flat surface problem. Take off clothes, pile on dresser, repeat. Employing the one minute rule here will be very important moving forward. I also identified some additional things to help me maintain a clean dresser. Make sure I have a hamper to put dirty clothes in. Sounds obvious, right? But we have a laundry shoot. And the practice has been to throw clothes down the laundry shoot instead of have a hamper in the bedroom. The other is to use a rack to hang clothes that I plan to wear again as opposed to piling them on the dresser. I like to wear things more than once. I change out of my work clothes when I get home from work and it seems silly to me to just throw those clothes down to be washed after only one wearing. Unless of course I’ve spilled on myself (which happens more often than I’d like). So, clothes that are to be worn again are hung on the rack on my door. Clothes that have run their course are put in the hamper or thrown down the shoot. And use the one minute rule to pick up the strays around the room each day. Send your positive energy my way. This simple plan is one I know I will struggle with. But here’s to maintaining a clean bedroom space!

Weekly

• Complete my first “Power Hour”

I chose four things of my power list to tackle today.

• Replace burnt out light bulbs in the garage, dining room, and living
• Run the cords for my computer properly
• Clean off end table next to couch
• Clean off and remove little table next to the china cabinet

Ok, it was more like a power 45 minutes, but all tasks were successfully completed. With one tiny little exception. I ran out of light bulbs so there is still one missing bulb in the dining room. So that task will remain on the list. And we’ll need to add buy light bulbs too 🙂

This was a good week. I love my house even more when its clean. And it looks so much better these days. With the exception of the office (adding to the power hour). The office is downright scary.