Lately I've been busy putting many small projects together for the season of discipline of Lent. I am going to work in ways that will put routine in my life and get back into the daily schedule I used to work towards each day. Not always having been the malingerer that I see myself to be now, I want to do some of the same ordinary things that used to be so obvious to me.

Getting dressed each day should not have to go on a list, but if it does for a while, then so be it. Dressed to Earrings. That means that I have to be dressed beyond dog-walkig clothes. These are the sorts of things I need to put back in my life. The fun of life that has gone missing.

As I look back on my adult life, that started when I was sixteen and got married for the first time. There wasn't any time or money for fun, once a pair of kids decided to set up housekeeping, to go out and have any fun, even a movie occasionally was hard on our income. Then there was having a baby and becoming a single working mom by age eighteen, and finally marriage again at twenty. Work was all I was able to think about. If I just get all the work done first, then I can go out and have some fun. But, being the A-type personality that others told me I was, I never had a good idea of what I'd like to do now that I was a grown-up, it seemed lke all they did was sit and watch while the kids went and did stuff.

At one time I became quite interested in gardening and the roses bloomed, the vegetables grew, the vines got tall. I seem to have lost all interest in that. One day I read an article that asked the question: What did you like when you were ten? Wow! that was a long time ago. Thinking, thinking, thinking . . . there was skipping, Jax, puzzles, scrabble, reading, writing stories, organizing my desk and papers. Making up stories out of the math problems was great fun. Not being allowed to keep a diary, I used to write out my entries in my notebooks so they would not be found. Looking words up in the dictionary was fun.

That is a list that says I really like eveything about language and creating stories and spending more time with all my writing now. I could probly do something with words for a living. I also have harp things that I like to do. I seem to have a few things that are play for me, but I don't let me do much of it, or very often

The daily list of things that I do will include work tasks and play time. Hopefully, I will do both ensuring a balance. My reward will be TV and computer going on at 1 PM in the afternoons, Sundays not included.