A few years ago, I had a friend come to help tidy things up around the school.

Unfortunately, one of her key tactics — throwing things away — caused me some dismay. She tossed things that didn't have any meaning to her or weren't immediately useful, like a lamp base without a lampshade or a photograph of a child she didn't know.

Saving too many things leads to cluttered spaces, but there is a difference between carefully assessing what should be kept and just chucking stuff indiscriminately. The choosing takes time and care, and delegating it doesn't work.

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It would be nice to escape right about now.

The trouble is, there's nowhere to escape to. And even if there were, they'd probably cancel your flight out.

So here we are, dealing with a reality that is once again not cooperating with our wishes. My heart goes out to anyone whose plan—whose life—has been upended by the new variant, along with all those who were already suffering before Omicron came to town. It's really hard.

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How do you transport an unregistered car to a new state in order to get it registered?

As it happens, there’s a plan for that. For instance, the state of Maine offers a ten-day transit permit that functions as a temporary registration.

And that would have been great for me, but the flimsy transit plate blew clean off the car somewhere in South Carolina only a few hours into my trip from Atlanta to Maine. So I got out the screwdriver and put on my old Georgia tag and hoped for the best.

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I’ve been with family for the last two weeks, making up for lost time. It’s wonderful.

The only problem is that I have only about three hours a day to work. (Yes, I guess I could have taken a vacation, but I didn’t plan ahead, so here I am.)

Working only a few hours a day is quite clarifying. I focus on the tasks that will cause a problem for me or someone else if I don’t do them. Everything else, even the stuff that is important-but-not-urgent, gets postponed.

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It can be sort of arbitrary what feels like work, right?

Sometimes, the same activity that was enjoyable on one day feels like a grind the next.

It can be almost physically painful to muster the concentration and emotional energy to get through certain tasks.

To deal with this, I start the day with intense creative work. Getting to the most difficult work first thing in the morning creates a momentum that I enjoy for the rest of the day. Even if everything else goes to hell afterward, I can say, “At least I got that scary thing out of the way.”

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