Shifting priorities

There are many things that I am not good at – golf and keeping my foot out of my mouth are two that immediately come to mind – but one thing I am awfully good at is reprioritizing my schedule when a new event or activity is added to it. Tonight is my last class, and I have to hand in a 29-page marketing report I wrote that extols the merits of selling Pelee Island package tours to Japanese senior citizens.Of course, writing this paper was pretty much the last thing I felt like doing during my free time for the past semester, and so the majority of the work fell into the last couple of weeks. And I did a great job of carving out blocks of time in my schedule to devote to said authorship…. I just didn’t always devote those blocks of time to the task at hand. Whenever I sit down to do schoolwork, it just seems that there is always something better to do; even those things I have been procrastinating on since forever suddenly seem much more interesting and important.
And so it was on Friday, when I had the day off, and I assumed that I would have Liam’s naptimes and a couple of hours each night all weekend to devote to writing my paper. It seemed like plenty of time. We could have fun together during the day – going to the pool, decorating our gingerbread house, Christmas party hopping – then I would buckle down and do some writing while Liam snoozed.A good enough plan, until I stopped by the paint store on the spur of the moment on our way home from the pool, and picked up paint for Liam’s big boy room. It was going to sit unopened for a few weeks, I swear, but then we had a power failure Friday afternoon just as Liam was off to bed… which meant no computer… which meant no writing. Instead, I cracked the paint open, and once I started I couldn’t stop; give me the choice between household chores and schoolwork, and the chores win, hands down. My paper went untouched all day Friday and Saturday until yesterday afternoon, when it was hastily polished off, but Liam’s room is almost fully painted. I do admit that I didn’t get around to the tidying I have spent weeks promising to do before the painting (since it used to be our spare bedroom and thus a bit of a catch-all), but Chad cut me some slack – I think he is happy to see progress of any kind, and he got in on the action too, by picking up and assembling the bed and hanging the blinds. All that’s missing now (paint-wise, anyway) is part of the trim. I hope to get to that a couple of nights this week, but I have a take home exam for this course that I have to get back to my professor by Thursday, so I’m not sure when it will happen. Then again… maybe the time crunch is all I need to make me really, really efficient.