Looking Up, Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Tonight's sunset photos are mostly from the "Stick your camera out the car window, click and hope" school of photography. It's not the best way to take pictures, but sometimes it's the only way. I was in a hurry tonight, taking Cayenne and Pepper to the dog park nearly an hour later than usual. That meant driving into the sunset. Pulling off the road to take pictures would have made us even later, and probably resulted in less of a view than straight down the middle of 22nd St. Also, my car windshield is currently filthy from a brief rain several days ago. So I snapped a bunch of photos whenever I could slow down for a moment or the view was particularly good.

(With oil painting effect.)

And now for the lame metaphor to justify posting sunset pictures and talking about something else entirely. As you may have noticed, I was a little upset the other morning when I posted a long rant about Lent and whether a person can really reform, whether I personally can reform and whether I've been slacking. Since then I've cleaned up the kitchen and several other areas of the house, done some shopping John asked me to do and finished and filed the taxes despite the fact that my doctor's centralized billing office never got back to me on my medical expenses for 2008. Even better, I'm currently finding it easy to keep the kitchen and bathroom clean. That's very unusual for me. I don't promise that this is a true amendment of life, a Lenten miracle. But for now things are looking up.

Looking ahead down the road, I'm seeing the CPA studying crashing in again after the respite I bought myself with my latest seminar rescheduling. It's perfect timing, now that the house looks better and the taxes are done, I should have time to keep up with it, and I'm keeping up with the dishes.

Over the years I've made a number of Big Announcements about how I'm going to do my homework with no more procrastinating, or lose weight, or exercise daily, or whatever the big goal of the moment is. But I learned years ago I'm not really like that. Sometimes I really do apply steady effort and accomplish great things, but it's not like flipping a switch, and for every success there have been failures. So no Big Announcement from me tonight. I don't promise that I will do all the dishes on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and beyond, or do X lessons a day online in the CPA review course. But looking back on the last few days, I see incremental accomplishment at least, and no reason I can't keep the momentum going for now.

Karen