Thoughts For A New Year or Nothing Is Resolved

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22612 – 926

Here’s the haps:

I’ve written before about the need to change my schedule but it’s really true. To do all the things I want to do and all the things I have to do and get some sleep requires, I estimate (off the top of my head, remember please, that I am not a math person), a 28 hour day. I think this means that I have to prioritize what I want to do.

And I do have a few set-in-stone priorities. Bible reading and prayer are tops. Every year I try to read the Bible completely through at least once. Since I started counting in 2015 I have read it through a total of ten times. This sounds like a lot to some but really, there is so much in there to see that I learn something new every time I do it.

Another priority is going to work. I have a couple more years to go before this can change. Ya gotta get up and make the donuts.

Other priorities include the honey-dos. To be fair, I don’t get a lot of these but it takes time to hang curtain rods and for some strange reason I can never seem to find the self-hanging ones. They all require manual hanging. Also, to be fair, some jobs frequently require that I go and buy some new power tool or other. The flip side of that being that with great tools comes greater expectations of jobs getting done. Oh, well…

Time is, in truth, money or at least a valuable currency. “Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.” But the truth is that the currency of time is far more valuable than dollars. Your boss pays you for your time with an eye to the value you return. I do the best I can to provide value to their investment but when it’s my time, then it is mine. If my teenage grandson comes to visit and I have the choice between looking at some comics and having a laugh together with him or reading, or even writing, a blog, the greater value, which really can’t be measured, is time with my grandson. I use him as an example but there are a veritable plethora of other examples I could use. Not only children and grandchildren but other people as well.

I love to read other people’s blogs but I also love to write my own. Sometimes people ask me to read their stuff, either for school or their own personal things, and I enjoy it. I enjoy being asked. It pays me for my time with the feeling of importance that someone in a college-level class thinks I am smart enough to critique their work. Or someone may share something personal with me and the price they paid was agonizing over whether to show it to anyone and the payment I get is their trust. These are big deals. But it all takes time.

Sometimes I start these rambling posts with a clear function and purpose in mind but then I wind up off on a rabbit trail and forget the point I was attempting to make in the first place.

In a bit of personal fun news for me, I had the opportunity to join Andertoons again. I wrote about them in a post called Cartoons On This Site back in August of 2019 and told how their licensing agreement was relatively inexpensive and very easy to understand. Any legalese that includes the sentence, “Basically, just be cool.” is really, um, cool. The upshot for you, dear readers, is that when I am running low on time and doing a meme dump or a joke dump I will also be able to include some classy toons, as well.

18 Comments

  1. Not really a rabbit hole. I totally relate. Which is not always a thrill for people who do not want to be related to me. The truest thing is how valuable your time is. I should have protected mine better when I was younger. It is too valuable to waste on outdated habits, especially when new priorities emerge like grandchildren. Be bold in getting control of your time! Stop reading this comment so closely. Skim it or skip it!

  2. When my kids were a little younger, I used to take off the entire summer from blogging because spending time with them was more important, and also exhausting. Readers were still there when I got back. I try not to sweat it too much if I can’t manage a post. There are bigger things.

  3. I’ve found that time is the most valuable thing we can give, because I’d need a 40 hour day to get all my stuff done. So I really appreciate when people do take the time to read my blog, have a coffee or a walk with me, call or whatever and I no longer take it for granted. I also think noone should have to apologize for choosing their priorities, even if it feels like we owe it to some people to include them

  4. It’s still amazing to me that when I was most knee-deep in helping care for my niece I was somehow still productive in my writing interests. The year I had with her in Maine, I was able to concentrate when I needed to. The few years I had with her in Florida with me, even trying to share as much time as possible with her, I still got things accomplished, and now that I don’t have her in my life anymore, I’ve actually struggled to feel as productive as I did then. Sometimes trying to find a balance is easiest when you have to find the time. (Of course, I was heaviest in writing longer manuscripts when I had **too** much time. Which seems pretty obvious.)

  5. Happy New Year and Happy Writing too. Love to read about your life and thoughts and jokes–the last one is wonderful. “Where were you last week?” That says it all that our mind doesn’t listen to us at all. Life is so much like this.

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