Ready, set, go!

The 168 Hours Time Tracking Challenge starts at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow (well, that’s when my time log starts! You can start yours whenever you like). You can still sign up to get daily email reminders; just click here.

I have been tracking my time for about 17 months, but I still enjoy opening a new spreadsheet every Monday morning. The most noticeable thing about the new spreadsheet: it’s blank. Eventually it will be full. My next 168 hours will be filled with something, but it’s interesting to think about what those things will be. I know some highlights: talks in NYC and Michigan (and dinner with my parents while I’m in the midwest!), a massage. Other things will be more serendipitous or spontaneous. My job is to make the most of these hours that are both precious and yet, in their own way, plentiful. I hope you will follow along and consider tracking your time too.

In other news: This weekend was one of those full early fall weekends that happen when you’ve got four active, social kids. Saturday featured swim practice (I ran during it — score one for multi-tasking!), soccer practice, an audition workshop, a flag football skills assessment, two birthday parties, and a preschool ice cream social. After dividing and conquering it all, my husband and I went out for dinner to celebrate our 12th anniversary. The dinner was mostly great, though my entree tasted a bit off to me, and sure enough, round about 3 a.m. I was nauseous and shivering with chills. Ugh. So my planned long run on Sunday morning did not happen. I got up with the baby from 5:30 to 6:40, handed him over to my husband and crashed until 9 a.m. Then I slowly got moving, first lying on the couch, then lying on the basement floor, and then finally recovering enough that we rallied and drove out to Frecon Farms, a new-to-us pick-your-own place near the little town of Colebrookdale. This was the complete opposite of Linvilla Orchards. Chill, pastoral, uncrowded. We picked 20 lbs of Galas, Cortlandts, and Golden Delicious apples. I was happy because Galas are my favorite apple, pretty much, and we almost always miss the picking season, because in my mind, apple-picking is a fall activity, and Galas are a late summer harvest. If we had been sans kids we would have stayed for the hard cider and live music, but I am not sure we would have gone to a pick-your-own farm without the kids. We came home, and then had a few kids over to swim in the pool in late afternoon, with hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. There was definitely a nip in the air by the end of it, and very much a sense that this was one of the last nice weekends. Other than the middle-of-the-night illness, it was a pretty good one.