Today was a hamster wheel of falling behind.

First, I woke up at 5:30, thanks to the time change. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but around 1 pm I really started feeling it.

Then, my first-off activity in the morning is scouring Craigslist ads and prepping responses. There were so many this morning that I did not wind up until 10; I try to be done by 9. From 9 to noonish I am scheduled to work on this portfolio-dev site showcasing a local filmmaker’s award-winning doc. I have been making good progress on the site and my work objective today was to deploy a a vanilla HTML version of the site with linked nav elements before I slap some chrome and lorem in place tomorrow. Just as I started to crank, the phone rang, and it was my firewood delivery.

The wood was as promised a full cord of mostly cedar, a bit weather-wet but not unseasoned. Cords are an inherently variable measure. It’s whatever volume of wood you can fit into four feet by four feet by eight feet. Ideally the wood is tightly stacked to fit that volume, but in practice dealers can make more money by stacking loosely, so it’s common to receive significantly less than 128 cubic feet of wood. This guy stacked his material super tight for delivery and may have actually bonused me. The upshot of this is that while I had budgeted an hour to stack the wood, it took two hours. So at noon I was two hours behind on my work schedule.

Things progressed along these lines all day. Various disruptions and commitments stole another hour and a half from the afternoon, notably shipping some telescope parts, and at the end of the day I wound up with just over an hour in on one of two projects slated to use six hours. I have to tighten up!