Staying On Task

While wishing I felt somewhat better, though coping adequately, these have been a pretty decent past few days.  Pesach concluded and I transformed the house back to chametz consumption.  My tasks for doing this were a mixture of defined and paced.  Boxes went to the basement, chametz utensils came upstairs in roughly the urgency with which they would be used.  A trip to Trader Joe's accumulated favorite chametz items including their brand pumpernickel and bagels.  Lastly I toted to the garbage bin those plastic bags that had protected our Pesach supplies from a year in our basement and made the fleishig kitchen island functional.

Another day this week I isolated neglected writing to my day's priorities, taking an idea for a composition, writing a wandering set of paragraphs, then scratching half the essay in favor of something more coherent and worthy of sharing in a publication.

Yesterday I assigned to gardening.  Preparing outdoor beds took some work.  Each needed three types of soil upgrade, which also required me to find a spade, pitchfork, and rake amid the randomness of my garage.  But with some challenge to my breathing, muscles, and stamina, each 4x4 foot section now has a layer of soil conditioner, organic compost, and top soil ready for the herbs and vegetables that should flourish better this spring than in years past.  I learned that some gardening should be made easy.  If I want culinary herbs for meals, grow them outside my front door in containers.  My main earthenware pot broke but its pieces should enhance drainage in the remaining pots if I scatter them at the bottoms.  The pot of spearmint survived the winter, now with abundant tiny leaves that should grow to mint julep size by Kentucky Derby weekend.  The large broken pot has been replaced and prepped.  Yesterday I created zones for four different herbs and will use the fragments of the broken earthenware to define the zones.  Potting soil had run low so that got replaced.  And I spent some time reviewing the contents of my garden folder, deciding which herbs go in which containers, though it remains too cool to plant any other than parsley.

After three great efforts at focus, home transition, writing, and gardening, I now find myself without a unifying daily goal.  NEJM needs some catchup.  Have some Delaware Community Foundation Scholarship applications to review, and it's never wrong to have another focused writing day, but taking care not to let that devolve into expressing myself excessively on social media.  Despite having twelve semi-annual initiatives, the days seem to go best when I isolate one or two.