GOLD STAR FOR YOU

Right now, this very minute, outside my window, is an amazing weather phenomenon. Loud snow.

Actually it's just tiny styrofoam-ball lookin' frozen rain, but it makes a wonderful soft rustling as it hits the trees and streets. So I have dubbed it loud snow, and loud snow it shall be.

I'm such a scattered person that I have trouble keeping a schedule, which is distressing because I also crave stability and discipline. As I progress through life, I've left mostly-empty planners behind me like a trail of broken hearts. But these days, I seem to have leveled up a bit.

Recently I bought a desk calendar, and have been using it to good effect as a way to remember which day is Inking day, which is Trash day, and so on. I've also started keeping track of my daily routine via a series of notecards on my desk.

Each morning I pull up one of the cards and write a series of tasks on it until I run out of room or tasks. The list usually has items like "Brush teeth" and "Gym" and "Eat five meals" as well as "Dishes" and "Clean kitchen," which are some of my daily House Elf jobs.

I cross off each task as it's complete, and if I have a cleared card by the end of the day, I write "Good Job!" and doodle big stupid stars and smiley faces all over the back of the card. It cheers me up. My current plan is to keep the "Good Job!" cards and, once I've accumulated enough of them, do something really special to reward myself for being functional like a human being.

On a related note, I kind of want to go shopping for gold star stickers tomorrow. You know, to stick on my calendar to mark "Good Job!" days. It would be shiny. I could show them off to company and they could praise me for being practically a superhero.

Okay, so maybe not so much with the "functional" after all. But who cares, as long as I get a kick out of it?