Wow, has it really been 19 days since I last posted here?

I knew I�d been busy and distracted, but I guess I didn�t realize for how long I�ve been busy and distracted. It feels like it�s been a lifetime since I left work. Since then, I�ve been doing a lot of studying, doing my Reiki once a week and completing a lot of home projects.

I�ve set up an office in what used to be our �meditation� room. For the past few months, it�d been our �we really need to do something about this� room.

One of my cats has a terrible fear of thunderstorms. If there�s a thunderstorm and an additional scary thing happens, instead of running, hiding or attacking, she pees herself. That happened in this room, and we were never able to correctly identify the spot, or if we had, we just couldn�t totally get the smell out.

So, we ripped out the carpet and pad and soaked the wood floor with urine destroyer. Now it seems to be fine. Fortunately, most of the time, Zophia is a lot braver these days and we hardly ever have to deal with her puddles, anymore.

Anyway, I�m slowly organizing and moving things around in here and I�m quite thrilled with it. Ever since Adam moved in, I�ve been fantasizing about having a space that�s all mine. I never created one because I used to be out of the house most of the time, anyway, and with Adam�s busy schedule, if I needed alone-time, I knew that I�d just have to wait a few days or just say, �Hey, I need some alone time.�

Now, with me being home most of the time, a space for myself is a must.

The other thing I�ve been doing is establishing a routine and organizing my life.

I completely organized my email and eradicated my spam. I unsubscribed to everything that I don�t need or don�t care to see. I gave them a little bit of time to do the actual unsubscribing, but after a few days, anyone who got an �unsubscribe� message from me and didn�t comply got blocked.

I reorganized my calendar so it�s easier to keep up to date, and I�m putting more stuff on it. I have task lists now.

Believe it or not, my new life is actually starting to feel routine. I was driving to Reiki yesterday and I didn�t feel like I was doing something totally alien and weird. I felt like I was going to work, except I was giddy with excitement to get there.

There�s this elderly lady that wants to be first every single time, she practically starts jumping up and down when she sees me walk through the door. Yesterday while driving to work, I actually felt that way about doing the Reiki.

Of course, it�s not all sunshine and roses. I am fearful. Sometimes my confidence wanes. The first couple of weeks, I was fighting some serious depression due to lack of routine (plus, being stuck in the house all day, oy!). I felt like my life had dissolved into chaos and I didn�t know which way was up, anymore. It didn�t help that during that couple of weeks, we had a heat wave that made it dangerous to be outside.

I have a professor whose style I don�t jive with, too, and I�m so anxious to succeed that I�ve been spending a lot of time on my studies. I had a meltdown over it last weekend and it didn�t matter how many times Adam reassured me that I was doing well (and probably doing better than all of the other students in my class), I just could not stop obsessing about how I believed that I wasn�t doing well. I felt like I had no control over the situation.

Now that I have some distance, I wonder why that in a classroom situation, I feel so helpless, yet, in my old job, I felt much more powerful. I spoke to clients in a way that no one else dared to speak to them (i.e. I was upfront and honest) and I got better results for it.

There I was agonizing over how to address my issues with my professor, and it wasn�t like I wanted to call him a jerk or anything, I just needed some simple clarification.

Maybe it�s just opening-night jitters.

Anyway, I�ve also determined that I want to make my social life a higher priority. Part of the reason that I left my job is because I want to live more. I want to spend more time on things that are good for me and make me happy.

To that end, I�ve also started a list of people. These are people whose friendships I want to keep. I keep in contact with most of them on some level, even if it�s totally online and never interactively. It�s still important to me to keep these things going and keep them healthy. So, I started with the list. My next task will to be to go through the list and write out exactly what I�m hoping to get from the relationship and how I expect to achieve it.

Does this sound incredibly control-freakish and� I don�t know, Out-Of-Work-Business-Analysty, to you? Perhaps so, but I really think it will be in my benefit to do this.

On my schedule, I�ve already got plans to go salsa dancing with Nicole tonight and dinner plans with her in a week and a half. I extended an invitation to Anthony for tonight for a pre-salsa dancing light meal. Nicole is going to her French club tonight before salsa, so we can�t meet earlier. Perhaps I am pushing it, a little, but I�ve been neglecting a lot of my friendships. For the first time in a long time, making plans with friends doesn�t feel like I�m over extending myself.

Over the past couple of years I have been going to the occasional salsa club, going on the occasional hike, going on the occasional snowboarding trip, going out to the occasional dinner or movie, and while I enjoyed those things, I usually had to push myself. It was like eating my metaphorical vegetables. I did it because I knew that being a hermit and spending ALL of my Friday nights and weekends hiding in my house just wasn�t healthy.

Now I feel like I want to go to dinner with friends. I want to go to salsa.

This development leads me to believe that life-wise, I�m actually on the right track here, or at least, on the right platform for the right track.

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