Keeping Myself Honest 2

A report on my resolutions more for my own benefit than anything else. 

There is a bit of a caveat this week. It's not my story to tell, so I'm not providing details, but a very close family member of mine who lives far away nearly died this week. I spent two full days this week fretting about a situation completely and utterly beyond my control and did pretty much nothing on those days. I mean, I went through the motions. I homeschooled, and taught piano and made dinner and drove kids where they needed to go. But every other minute was spent either worrying or praying or trying to find out what was going on.  My goals and self-betterment, while important, paled mightily in comparison to the life of someone I love. I'm not excusing myself, but giving myself a bit of wiggle room.  Due to the incident, I will be travelling west this week to help care for this person and her family and am trying to prepare everything for my family for while I'm gone. So, other than scripture reading, everything else is going to be catch as catch can.

Spiritual: I accomplished my reading goal everyday, though I found that if I don't get the bulk of the reading done in the morning before Lilyanna wakes up, it mostly gets left until the evening when I'm definitely not absorbing as much.

Physical: Running went great this week! I am following a training schedule for a couch to half marathon, but discovered that I could skip to week 4. This is especially good news, because it means I might actually be ready in time for the big half marathon this spring in Columbus.  We'll see! Belly dancing was super fun, and I totally skipped my hellish boot camp class since it was in the midst of the days of fret.

Financial:  Financial fasting was okay. I spent unexpected money for travel, though the bulk of my plane ticket was given in a most welcome but unexpected offering of frequent flier miles from my father in law.  The whole situation made me reflect on something I read in a book by the Economides family. They mentioned that one of  their standards for an emergency fund is "How much would it cost to fly the entire family to a funeral of a loved one on short notice?" Tickets are absurdly expensive if you don't have the traditional two weeks lead time.  The price for us, right now, would have been so prohibitive that there's no way we all would have been able to go should things have gone as badly as they could have gone. Fortunately, we didn't have to make an awful choice like that, but it makes me all the more determined to make sure that we pad our emergency fund better.

Organizing: I'm still doing a good job at getting rid of things, but the challenge was a bit of a disaster. My counters are improved, but in no way good. Losing two days didn't help, but honestly, I didn't make it enough of a priority at the beginning of the week. I was using a cram mentality, which isn't going to work for me with organizing. It needs to be a more methodical process.