I was telling my friend Moliére last night that I'm feeling particularly blessed lately. My relationships are great with my partners, things are going well at my day job, I've got not one but two side projects going, one I'm actively working on now, and the other I've got plans in the works to begin writing code for this summer.
All this activity and goodness does come with a price: I'm really busy. I don't watch much television these days, take rare breaks for the occasional video game, and I have to watch my time management like a hawk.
It's not a code problem.. it's an opportunity to learn to do it better.
Case in point: So this morning I'm working on the prototype for my business, which I just decided I will call Project Drummond here in the blog. I started working around 7:30, and felt my creative juices really kick in about 15 minutes later. I begin creating a new javascript library, refactor a function I used on a previous page to be more flexible, create a new controller action, realize I need to customize a modal before I can proceed further, and begin doing that, and then.. WHAM.
I realize I'm basically out of time to keep going this morning. Why?
Here's the scoop - I can't not do this, if I want to be able to sit.
Well, first of all, one of my household chores is to clean my cats litter box every single day. It keeps them happy and healthy, makes the downstairs/guest/cat bathroom a pleasant room to be in, and prevents the dreaded "angry-cat-potty-elsewhere non-accident." I typically do that just before I get out the door.
I let that go some the past few days, and got a right hard spanking for it, which I well deserved.
Sitting in traffic is total shit.
Second, while I'm fortunate that my day job is pretty flexible about my time, and lets me set my own schedule, work variable days, blah blah blah, there's still this other shit I have to deal with: traffic. It's pretty bad around here, and if I don't want it to eat my day, I have to get on the road, really, no later than 9:30am to have a decently scheduled day.
As I was lamenting this first-world-not-a-terrible-problem problem of mine, I got a nice big gratitude epiphany, like a lightning bolt. These are wonderful problems to have. I have to juggle taking care of my delightful cats, living up to the responsibilities my loving and discipline minded Mommy and Aunty set for me, so I can have the energy to go to my really terrific job, while balancing the work of my very promising side business.
It's not like I'm crawling on my hands and knees over broken glass for thirty miles to get a dixie cup of water to bring back to the village, so they can water our one remaining Yak.
Yes, dealing with shit like litter (actual shit), and traffic (shitty), and time being a finite quantity (shitty truth) are difficult, but they're great difficulties to have.
I'm grateful.