Friday ConeZone #9

It's finally Friday! Has this week dragged on for anyone else? Clearly from my last post I've been having a rough one. But I'm feeling a bit better and ready to have a good weekend filled with spring cleaning and a trip to IKEA. Part of the reason I'm feeling better is I made some progress on my college preparations. We ordered our bikes this morning and I picked up my transcript from my old high school this afternoon. That's two things I can check off my to-do list. And with the purchase of our bikes in mind I thought a good choice for today's ConeZone would be Conan's adventure as a New York City bike messenger. I try to keep it topical to what I've got going on, when I can. I don't know if anybody cares, but it helps me whittle down the clip options, ha. Enjoy and happy Friday!

What is "Good Enough"?

I am having a busy week at work and at home. I've been paying bills, moving money around for retirement, and to pay for Conan tickets and our taxes. The other office person has been out sick, so that means more work for me. I'm trying to keep forging ahead on re-learning math skills before I take a college placement test. Our eating habits have been not so great lately, so I've been working a lot on that. I'm gearing up for spring cleaning this weekend, since Josh will be on the road. I haven't been doing anything with photography lately. I'm not keeping up with my Newsweek subscription very well. I've become a total slacker when it comes to Small Time Cooks. I've got several partly read books on my bedside table. I've made very little progress on my resolutions. There are a lot of unfinished projects around the house. My insomnia is totally getting the better of me. And I'm slowly realizing that I can't do everything, especially when I'll be adding school to my plate.

Lately the phrase "The perfect is the enemy of the good" has been popping up around me. I've read it on other blogs, in some of those half-finished bedside books, and I keep coming back to it. It makes sense to me, but I can't even begin to figure out how to actually apply it. I don't know how you figure out what is "good enough". Everytime I think of my long list of to-do's they all seem necessary. I was talking about stuff with a friend over coffee this weekend and she was somewhat amazed at my ability to connect whether or not I peel and chop my own carrots to whether or not I'm succeeding or failing in life. I have to prepare good food for us because it's important for my health and Josh's. I have to make sure I'm eating the right things to help keep my health problems in check. So how do I measure "good enough" when it comes to feeding us?

Keeping a clean house is very important to me, especially because I'm actually the messy one of the two of us. I've been teased that I could rent my house out to build micro-chips in. Let me just tell you that isn't the case because dusting is one cleaning duty that I am actually very lax on. I'm lax on a lot of them, but if I don't clean house often enough I feel like I'm failing. Sometimes Josh will do some cleaning and I will feel awful about it. I feel differently when he offers to help, but when I can hear him from the other room cleaning, unprompted, I feel guilty, like I've let him down. I have a shelf of books about cleaning and housekeeping in my office. I cleaned house last weekend in anticipation of spring cleaning this weekend. Cleaning your house so you can be ready to clean your house? Seems a bit much. But how can I hope to be at peace if my house is in chaos?

I hate that I don't always get to ironing Josh's shirts and that he will wear them anyways. I feel like his wrinkled clothes are a public display of my laziness. Everytime we buy prepared things at the store I say to myself "I should be making this." I should be making the bread. I should be making the salad dressing. I should be making the graham crackers. Do you know how time consuming it is to make graham crackers? Rolling, scoring, baking in batches. And do you also know how inexpensive graham crackers are? And yet it bothers me. Josh came back from staying with friends in Austin this weekend and told me how the wife made migas and bacon for everyone, and I apologized for not doing that too. His response was "You're always making good breakfasts." I almost NEVER make breakfast on the weekends. If he doesn't seem to even notice, why do I still feel the need to apologize?

I have this quote taped to my work monitor: "Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."- H. Jackson Brown. I think I'm going to take it down though because every time I look at it I say to myself "Yeah, but they didn't have to do the laundry and clean the toilets."

How do I figure out what's "good enough"?