I have been making short manageable lists of the thing I need to do each day, (tomorrow's includes post office, deposit check, buy ice tea, buy goldfish crackers [on major sale at Safeway], send emails on KidLit Con, write review of After the Golden Age, etc etc.), and then I had an epiphany today and realized I really need to make a cumulative list, a serious list, the mother-of-all lists because honestly if I don't get a handle on what the heck I'm trying to accomplish this summer then it is going to blow past me before I realize all the things I didn't get done.

So I got a big piece of paper. And then I got several more sheets. And now I am writing everything from "clean closet" to "deal with mystery cupboard in laundry room" to "get contact info for book trailer". I have house stuff and kid stuff and book stuff and short story stuff and next book stuff (which I am totally worried about because I've had to keep doing so much stuff for MAP that I have not started anything truly substantial on the next book and I'm starting to worry that I never will and if I never will then I will only be a one book writer and while that is just fabulous for Harper Lee I'm not thinking I'm quite in her league).

Whew.

In the meantime, my sanity has been maintained by completely junking my careful column planning for August and reading only books that interest me at this very moment which has included Young Romantics by Daisy Hay (if only I had this when I was slaving through Shelley and Byron in high school then I might have actually enjoyed myself) and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (TOTALLY living up to the hype thus far; I'm loving it) and a book on war essays that I found while cleaning out my office and I realized that if I don't start reading all these books I asked people to buy me over the past few years then I will never read them and that is totally and completely intolerable plus shameful because people gave me these books because I really wanted them and I still want them and really, I should read things I want on top of all the things that work for my column and the books I'm sent by Booklist (I'm reading a history of Arctic exploration for them right now and it's very good and totally what I know which is comforting).

And then, there is my office. Oh good grief. I stood in there last week and thought I have to deal with this and it's going to be brutal and messy but this stuff has got to be sorted and dealt with and some of these things must go go go. I am making stacks of things to go away or move or file with abandon right now. Many stacks. What really prompted all this activity is the hundreds of photos from my great grandmother's photo albums that I brought back from Florida. I have to scan them in for the family and print out copies for me and my mom and as I made room for all of them, (my mom and I already put them in some order so it's not too daunting) (and I'm not scanning all the pics in - many of the originals will just go to various appropriate family members), I also sorted through already existing piles of childhood pictures of my father that my aunts sent a few years ago and some old pics of my brother and I that came to me after my French grandfather died two years ago and then all the pictures of my own child that have not been put in albums and I had another epiphany: I come from photo album people and have totally dropped the ball on my own photo organizing.

(I blame my mother partly for this - her photo organizing went to heck sometime in the seventies.) (And I know you're reading this Mom and you totally know I'm right.) (The drawer, Mom - you must deal with the photo drawer!!!)

I'm not a scrapbooking person but my Irish grandmother had this row of three ring binders with black paper and the photos held in with corners and neatly written labels and they were awesome. What I have are boxes of photos with little rhyme or reason to who or when or where. This might seem silly to worry about except my mother and I spent days and days pouring over Nana's albums and getting heartbroken over not knowing who was in the pictures we were staring at because even though we don't doubt we were related to those people, we just don't know who they were because she didn't label them. Fortunately my grandmother had labeled lots of photos she had from way back when so we could use them to find some folks and my mom knew lots of the people but still. There were so many we just did not know and the historian in me goes nuts over this.

So photos. Added those to the master list.

And that's my crazy life right now at the moment. The list will keep me sane. It has to.