Up in the middle of the night

[northlighthero]

It's about to be two in the morning. I turned off the light at 11:30 pm after my second Turkey Day this week. And almost at once found myself lying wide-eyed in the dark, trying to cement into my memory the 'do-list' and 'light-bulb' items that had just sifted up from my dreaming mind. Over the next hour I turned the light on three more times, each time to write a dozen lines of chicken-scratch notes. Finally I got up to eat (just a little yogurt), drink (two glasses of water), read the newspaper, and hope to become sleepy.

Didn't work.

So what's keeping me awake? Earth-shattering stuff like the fact that:

• tomorrow (today, now) is the first of the new month and I haven't made the new hand-written kitchen calendar yet, decanting everything from four people's daybooks and PDAs onto an 11x17 grid on the fridge.
• I just thought of another area of inquiry for my Final Project for Call of the Dark Mother, a seminary course in death and dying and pastoral care -- and that means a whole 'nother page of outline.
• tuition equity.
• the dentist appointment I canceled at the last minute two weeks ago because I started sneezing with a cold ... and now must reschedule.
• all the commitments on my calendar between now, the last 48 hours of my Dear Husband's visit home, and Sunday, when I need to be in the pulpit delivering the fourth of this week's writing assignments, none finished.

And finally:

• whether or not to once again buy a year's worth of a Day-Timer book (you know, paper pages) because my Palm Pilot drives me crazy, even though I would still use the Palm constantly for long-term scheduling; several dozen memos of historical fact, births and anniversaries, my lifelong reading list; and all the phone contacts in my life. This shouldn't be such a hard decision, considering how useful it has been to me in just the last year to be able to pick up an old Day-Timer and flip pages until I find the fact I need ... but I still struggle. I want the perfect answer to be simple, lightweight, intuitive, and graphic.

Now, this is actually useful. Some of what's been on my mind the last two hours is truly unimportant. Hurrah! And some of what's been on my mind probably IS important, but not urgent -- almost all of it will comfortably wait until mid-week, or allow me to work on it an hour or two at a time until then. Only a very little of it is BOTH important and urgent (meaning 'gotta do it tomorrow').

Am I sleepy yet? No, not quite. But getting there.