Wednesday, October 4, 2023

Of Distractions and Quiet Muses by Konnie Enos


 Despite multiple notes that I had a blog post to write yesterday, I did not get it done.

What did I do yesterday?

After spending more time than I should not doing anything productive because I didn’t want to tackle paying our bills, I finally opened everything I needed to get that chore done. Which took considerably longer than it should have in light of how much I actually got done.

My first obstacle was Jerry and the mild argument we had about how much money he’d already spent and from the account I’d told him not to touch because I needed all that money for the bills. It took nearly two hours to figure out, and re-figure out, what I had to juggle around to make sure everything was covered.

Next, I had to tackle making sure my Quicken records were balanced with the bank records. Then I had to make sure all our bills were paid. Normally this would have taken about half an hour but I kept getting interrupted.

After we discussed his spending, he found multiple reasons to interrupt what I was doing. One would think since he was in the same room with me and saw all the material I use to track our finances scattered around me, that he would understand I was busy, but apparently not.  He even handed his phone to me, not once, but three times to deal with one issue we had, and the last one required me to stop what I was doing to deal with some emails and other paperwork.

Then there is Royce, also here in the house and he takes great delight in telling me about the stories he is reading and what happened this time in the newest chapters. He came in at least once. Thankfully somewhere between everything strewn around and the fact I wasn’t looking up from my screen clued him in on the fact I was indeed too busy to have a conversation with him.

Now Melinda did come into my bedroom once but she didn’t even say a word to me. Of course, I was in the bathroom as she entered but she was smart enough to understand why I had everything strewn over my bed and just dropped the mail and left. I probably wouldn’t have even known she’d been the one to get the mail if I hadn’t seen her leaving my room.

Considering that’s all who was in the house at the time, you would have thought the interruptions would end there. You’d be wrong because I have other family members. I heard from all my children and Bonnie yesterday.

First was Clarissa, though she didn’t interrupt my efforts to do our finances. She’d called before I got breakfast. So not an interruption. It was fun talking to her and my youngest grandbaby while my son-in-law took the older one to school.

Then two people managed to both call and text me yesterday. Tony texted me while I was paying bills which required me to stop what I was doing to respond to him. He then called me later in the evening, after I’d finished paying all the bills. Then Bonnie called me while I was busy, though it was a short conversation. This she followed up with a text conversation later in the evening about a Facebook post our brother had made, which she’d clearly misread. I’d already seen it since I was on Facebook unwinding at that hour.

Finally, Tina. Though she didn’t interrupt me. Jerry did. He insisted I contact her right away. So I had to stop again and text another child to ask her one question.

When all was said and done, I ignored all reminders and indications I needed to write this post and instead decided to unwind on Facebook. I justified this by the fact I had no ideas to write about anyway.

I finally decided I needed to either stay up half the night trying to write while fighting sleep or get some sleep and get up early to get this written. Getting sleep won.

None of this gave me any ideas but when my alarm went off this morning I dutifully opened my laptop and a blank Word document and just started typing about why I didn’t get this done yesterday.

The long answer is this post trying to blame everything on the interruptions I had yesterday. The short answer is far closer to the truth. I went down the rabbit hole that is Facebook for several hours instead.

I tend to opt for distraction hoping my muse will strike me. However, I usually have no idea until I start writing. My muse prefers action before inspiration, most of the time.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

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