Decisions: Managing the household and farm during NanoWriMo

I have made a few decisions. The hardest decision is to give up my night time White Russian made with home made Coffee Liquer and raw milk. We will not discuss the Vodka as it is against the law in America to have a Still. I will only drink tea in the evenings in November.  Though I will still have a wine with dinner. That is a good decision.

Decisions themselves take up a lot of time and imagination so I will also give up decision making itself for anyone other than my animals and myself for the month of November.

I won’t tell anyone else how to be. Or say ‘I hate to say this however..’, or ‘I don’t mean to interfere but..’or ‘well in my opinion…’ because I will be floating about in my own little bubble and I will allow the family to empower themselves by working this stuff out by themselves. 

I won’t nag about  ‘homework’ or ‘you’ve been gone for hours what have you been up to’, or ‘You are going to drown in one of those potholes, one day, if you don’t fix the lane.’ 

Everyone can do their own laundry and I will not nag them to ‘get on with it or do you want to go to school/work naked.’   Something I do not want to see. I will  not harp on about boys cleaning the boys bathroom,  and ‘why is the grout a funny colour’ I will not whine on about how if they want to ‘leave water and soap all over and slip and wack their stupid heads that is their  own choice’.

You see how easy this is going to be. In fact My life will be nicer as long as I do not have to actually go into the boys bathroom.

However I have been making very strict decisions for myself. Every Sunday I shall arrange a weeks worth of my own clothes into  daily bundles, stacked neatly in piles. Farm pants, tops, warmie, knickers and bra all folded together.  Seven of them. Then I do not need to make decisions about what to wear.

Every Sunday I shall write a menu of  dinners and create the grocery list accordingly. Then I will not need to make decisions about food. In fact I should do this for the rest of my life -I always have trouble deciding what to cook for the ungrateful masses.

I will ask the Matriarch to feed the teenager in town once or twice a week and monitor his homework from there. I will ask John to cook me those fabulous Thai soups more often.

Someone else can do the grocery shopping and go to the feed store. Can I give away all the jobs I hate? Just so I can write a book?  Thinking deeply. Um. Yes.

I don’t want to make too many decisive changes because I might forget what they are and then I will spend time and brainpower trying to remember what I have decided.  But I will use the fridge doors to write lists as I think of things so I don’t have to think about remembering things.  And I am going to rename myself The Little Red Hen. I like her attitude. 

Mostly I am clearing space in my head but I also need to clear space in my day. So here is the TimeTable.  I have a timetable of sorts anyway but this one will be in stone for a month. What do you think?

• 5am -6 am – Get out of bed and stumble to computer then Write to you and post the blog.
• 6am. – Milk the cow, feed the animals, take photos and all that stuff.
• 8 – 9am – Breakfast. Hang out in the Lounge of Comments and do a wee bit of visiting; I would hate to miss out on what you are up to so drop me a line if i miss an important post.
• 9am – 10 Fast forward housework. (I do this already) I love to do housework in fast forward. I do everything once and as quickly as possible.
• 10 – 11 am -Visit the old people, write to children, correspondence: my people cannot be neglected just because I am writing a book.
• 11 – 1 pm- Prepare dinner. Take pictures. Farm work.  Load pictures onto tomorrows Weblog page. Read yesterdays writing. Block out todays writing.
• 1 – 4 pm- NaNoWriMo – two thousand legible words a day minimum. Though in the first week I want to give myself a five thousand word buffer in case of emergencies.  Always stop in the middle of a sentence or action so it is easy to pick up the next day.
• 5 – 6.30pm-  Milking, feeding out, farm work.
• 7 – 7.30pm-  Finish dinner and feed dinner to family.
• 7.30 – 8.30 – Load photos onto tomorrows blog,  shuffle about the blog world a little. Shower, bed!

Good morning. In fact the only real change to my normal timetable is writing The Book, which is called Potatoes are Your Best Friend by the way, from 1 – 4 pm each day. Usually this time is spent in the gardens, watering, weeding, taking photos and playing with the animals, with a little writing thrown in.  Now that the gardens have been handed over to the Shush Sisters I have more time.

That all makes a certain amount of sense to me. Have you any ideas? We have a week to make any changes.

Now it is 6 am and I must get moving..

You all have a lovely day.

celi