A Blog in Search of a Theme

I didn’t mean to go a week without writing to this blog, but life got in the way. Work, health, and other writing endeavors pulled me away, and I neglected here.

One of the problems is I’m still searching a little for a revised theme for An Arrow Through the Air. My other blog, at the davidatodd.com website, is for documenting my writing life and promoting my writing. I figure that, if I ever have hoards of fans, that other blog is where they will go to keep track of my writing news. This blog I hope to make something different. I thought of building on Wesley’s “arrow through the air” metaphor and making this blog about metaphors of life. That still seems like a good idea, but I haven’t been able to bring it off yet.

So I continue to flail about here, posting about writing, about life, about health, about death—about anything that happens to be in my mind at the moment. In my mind right now is accomplishment. Yesterday I completed a number of small tasks at work, as well as taught a brown bag class on the noon hour. At home in the evening I proofread my second short story, typed the edits, formatted it for Kindle, uploaded it, created a dummy cover, and saved it as a draft. I’m not going to upload it until I receive the final cover. Although, if it takes too long, I may use the dummy and activate the e-book. Or, possibly I’ll learn graphic software and start doing simple covers myself.

 Also last night I came very close to inputting all checkbook entries for 2011 into my budgeting spreadsheet. That included finding and correcting a nagging error in the spreadsheet. I still need to find out why I have a discrepancy in some of the categories (too much in housing, not enough in medical), where apparently I made an error in allocation early in the year. But I think I’ll wait until I have all the year entries made, and see what needs to be done about reallocation.

 Today, I have had similar accomplishments even to this time of day (12:36 PM CDT). I have completed many tasks for my day job, including finding and processing a nagging invoice for $300 to a contractor. My time sheet is up to date, with annotations. My December billings are out the door. A major clean-up of my office has begun, as I transition out of project work and into full time training. And I made progress with my co-presenter on the full day class we’ll be teaching at the erosion control conference on February 26^th.

 For personal stuff so far today, I called a credit card company and took care of one problem. I went on-line to check for debits not recorded in the checkbook and have those up to date. I went through three months of expense reimbursements so that tonight I can record them in the right categories on my budgeting spreadsheet. And the noon hour isn’t over and I have time to work on this.

 Tonight, Lynda and I will most likely watch a couple of episodes of The West Wing, season three. I’ll try to finish my budgeting spreadsheet for the year, including allocating those expenses. And I hope to work on one remaining medical reimbursement claim for 2011, maybe even complete it for mailing tomorrow. Writing tonight? Probably not, but that’s okay. Perhaps with these many tasks completed, I’ll have a productive writing weekend.