Smart Choices

I'm feeling pretty proud of myself. Its no secret that I am terrible at taking care of myself, and that the way I order my priorities is a bit askew. But this weekend I made the right choice and am feeling pretty smug.

I had two large projects for school that were assigned last week and that unfortunately were both due today. They both involved drawing, which I really enjoy doing, but am very s l o w at. I started one on Wednesday, had Mags Thursday, and lost all of Friday to yet another trip to the doctor AND babysitting the daughter of a friend of mine. I ended up having to stay at home whilst Husband took Mags and said other child to the ranch over this most glorious of weekends. Grumble, grumble, grumble. But, I try hard to be a responsible student, and so I put on my big girl panties, rolled up my sleeves, and got to work. I literally set my alarm for 6am each day. Saturday I put myself to bed by 1030 pm, and had a few breaks during the day, but other than that worked like mad designing and drawing costumes for "The Magic Flute". Sunday I ran from fabric store to fabric store getting swatches for the aforementioned costumes until late afternoon. I stopped long enough to eat oocasionally, but not much else. Then I had to run from art store to art store to get the supplies needed to color these illustrations. That's when the trouble really began. Stores didn't have what I needed. Kinkos didn't have the paper I needed. What to do? What to do? Suddenly I was faced with having to pull an all nighter to get these assignments done, and that just made me incredibly angry and frustrated.

I thought about it for a while -- well, first I tried to get Husband on his cell phone to tell me what to do. Sadly he didn't answer, and I was forced to make a decision all by myself (gasp!) Should I play sick and just not go in? I'd lose all points for my late assignments if I did...and I try to not play that game. I used to do that fairly regularly, but these days I try not to lie to teachers about that. Its definitely harder to uck it up and tell the truth, but I've earned a lot of good karma points with both the universe and my teachers for being frank. So I decided to stop what I was doing because there's no way I could realistically get it all done, give myself the rest of the night off, get a good nights sleep, go to class in the am. and just turn in what I had.

And that's exactly what I did. I called some friends, watched "Batman Begings" (veru good!) went to bed at 10pm, and was relaxed and happy when I woke up this morning. My teachers weren't thrilled, but at least I showed that I had been working on them, and I ended up having a really good day.

Two months ago -- hell, last month -- I would have stayed up until it was all done, swearing and being angry, wrecking my sleep even more than it already is these days, and set myself up for a bad week. Golly, I'm actually learning! Sweet! Go me!