Beat It Then.

The heat has had me beat for two week or more. I'm losing track of time. What day is it now?

But maybe I'm getting acclimated because this evening after dinner I started a project in our room that took me two hours of non-stop physical effort. Of course it helped that within minutes of starting I had too big of a mess on the bed to get back on. The most I could do was sit on the edge of the mattress to catch my breath, get a drink and wipe sweat out of my eyes.

I started out by sorting the laundry that had piled up on the floor beside the bed since I got back from Longview on the 7th. That space between the bed and my craft chest has become our hamper and the pile my hassock. The pile is back in place now but it is sorted by loads so I can easily go put a load on when the time is right. It was too late to start one by the time I got the mess cleaned up in here.

The laundry wasn't the extent of the mess I'd placed on the bed. I'd had to move the craft chest and craft bags as well because the pile of stuff in the closet behind it had shifted forward pushing the chest towards the bed making that space narrower so I couldn't get the drawers open far enough to get things out.

There were a number of other issues that same project accomplished. Little inconveniences that made many of the projects on my agenda either difficult or impossible to accomplish so every time I did have a moment when ambition and energy coincided I opted not to start those projects.

Earlier this week as I approached the end of season 6 of Desperate Housewives, the last of those streaming on NetFlix, I decided that after the last of those episodes it would be a good time to start changing my video watching habits. And because changing habits is best accomplished by replacing them with other habits, I decided was that I needed to earn the minutes of watching with minutes of productive tasks.

It used to be that most of my video watching was accompanied by crocheting which helped me to justify how much I was watching. But when I hurt my left arm over a week ago I had to stop crocheting for a few days and by the time I was able to again I'd broken the obsession with it and the craving to have the hook in my hand. I thought at the time I would be replacing the crocheting with writing and reading and various other activities and projects. But I ended up vegging in front of the video screens.

The heat played a big role in how that worked out. But it was time to shift the balance away from videos in spite of the heat and there were many things being left undone that took as little physical output as watching videos. Most of those take more mental engagement though and it is hard for me to switch mental channels. But the experience with stopping the crochet obsession coupled with the experience of participating in WFMD (Writing for Fifteen Minutes a Day) reminded me that interrupting whatever my current mania is can be done. Especially WFMD.

Every time I did my WFMD 15 minutes it was like pulling two strong magnets off metal but several times those fifteen minute writing sessions turned into more. So I know the key is to just start something and give a good faith fifteen minutes and chances are the magnet will switch targets.