Made up a salad tonight to take to dinner at our friends’ house:

baby spinach
thin-cut apple slices
dried cranberries
toasted walnuts
crumbled extra-sharp cheddar cheese
poppyseed and caramelized onion dressing

YUM.

A lot of my “free” time recently has gotten sucked up in preparation for the sermon I delivered this morning. It went well, I think, and I can now look forward again.

1) We got new phones! And unlimited texting! Whee!

2) I caved and joined Twitter. I am @betsywhitt over there. I suppose I should put one of their little buttons in my sidebar.

3) Things are good. I have very few complaints.

4) It is time for bed very, very soon.

It’s been an interesting week. I’ve gotten some things done as planned, and others have fallen through the cracks. If I’m honest, that’s because I have stayed up too late and then been extremely reluctant to wake up early enough to have a truly productive morning. It’s a common trend in my life.

Matt has the car today, so I’m stuck here at the apartment. Stuck isn’t really the best word. I mean, I do have legs. I can walk somewhere–there’s a wide variety of things within a mile of here. Or I could ride my bike, which opens the circle of possibilities further. And, you know, there are city buses. But the easiest, coolest (as in, air conditioned) mode of transportation is the car, and I don’t have access to it today, which means either I will lie on the couch and waste time (tempting, but guilt-inducing) or I will get up and get to work on the variety of things just waiting for my personalized attention (delayed gratification–stinky now, feels great later).

The dog is extra-needy today. She wants attention and activity. Both Matt and I have been gone during the day for the last five or six days, so her life has been less than exciting, napping and waiting for us to come home. We’ll see if I can work out a trip to the dog park after Matt returns with the motorized chariot. I suspect she will curl up touching me once I settle into place at my workspace, which today is my folding table since my desk is covered in Stuff I Need To Deal With Eventually and if I have to look at all that Stuff I won’t get any revisions done. And nobody wants that.

That’s about all the news. Things here are, on the whole, quite good. Can’t complain, except that I’m not getting enough done. And that’s nobody’s fault but my own.

My circle of friends has established a word that I feel is ready to be released to the general public.

snorfle – noun – the noise made when laughter is muffled, produced by the same function that shoots liquid out your nose, sans liquid.

Nice, isn’t it? I’m particularly fond.

It seems that every so often–sometimes longer, sometimes shorter–I find it necessary to step back and refocus. People who don’t know me very well laugh when I give them my standard self-description: tall, blonde, and easily distracted. “Easily distracted?” they say, “You read huge books in one sitting!” As if that’s the pinnacle of focus and attention. Seriously, people, I read books in one sitting (or as close as I can get) because if I don’t, I’ll get distracted, put it down and more than likely forget I ever intended to finish it. And because it’s a convenient way to be distracted from other things I’m supposed to be doing.

Sometimes I’m conscious of allowing distractions to edge their way in, and other times I look up and realize I have no idea how I got so far off track.

So I’m refocusing. Matt’s out of town again this week on a nice long wilderness backpacking trip courtesy of Solid Rock Outdoor Ministries, so I’ve got plenty of time and space to clear out the mental cobwebs.

Family: Happily, one of the aspects of my life that hasn’t slipped much lately. Goal is to maintain and deepen time/interaction with family.

Career: Two aspects of this, the writing and the day job. As the day job looks much different now than it did 6 weeks ago, and looks more and more likely to disappear sooner rather than later, I can dedicate more time to the writing. In the current job market, I’m leaning toward investing myself in writing rather than wasting time and energy trying to find a nonexistent position. Regardless, I need to set short and long-term goals for my writing, and I need to find someone to crack the whip and make me stick to them once I set them.

Finance: We spend more money than we ought. We have a peculiar financial situation, and it often results in a rather lax view toward budgeting and savings. I’m taking steps to adjust our mentality on that, beginning with trying out the MVelopes.com service.

Health and Wellbeing: I caught up on sleep last week, and it’s a wonderful thing. I’ve also gotten myself swimming semi-regularly at the apartment complex pool. I’m working on setting up a regular time to take Shiloh to the dog park, which gives us both exercise, and I’m really really (really) going to recommit to my WiiFit schedule.

Recreation: Much of this also falls under exercise, since much of our recreation is active, but I’m making sure I block out time for reading. We also got an XBOX 360 recently, and Fable 2 allows us to log into the same game together and kill bad guys. I’ve STILL got a big unfinished quilt that needs to be completed. And I do very much like meeting people for coffee.

Personal: I am learning about the care and keeping of cacti (turns out they do best in steady, diffused light, not direct sunlight, so Bob2 is back in the office) and I am contemplating installing a window-box-style herb garden on the porch railing, if I can be reasonably assured I won’t kill them all. My writing definitely counts in this category, too, for a variety of reasons.

Friendship: I generally operate with a bit more distance than some people in terms of friendships, so once I plug back into my “usual” sources of information and communication, there’s not much of a course correction that’s going to happen here. There are a few people, though, who I want to be better friends with, and I’ll be intentional about getting together with them.

Community: For all intents and purposes, the church congregation serves as our community. I’d love to get more connected in the neighborhood and the town eventually, but right now it’s just not possible. I’ll be keeping an eye out, though, and laying the foundation to move on that when the time is right. Meanwhile, maintaining relationships with people in the church, our small group, etc., are the standard.

Household: Goal is to do a general sweep of the house every night to tidy up – clean the kitchen, run the dishwasher if necessary, put the stuff that always lands on the dining room table away, corral the dog toys, find the remotes, etc. Once a week laundry and vacuum, and we’ll be cutting back drastically on eating out.

Spiritual: This one’s between me and God, but it’s definitely part of my consideration in refocusing and being deliberate about how I spend my time.