I don’t do a ton of monthly planning, but I have found that a month is a good time line for what I call my “annoying projects” list.
This is a running list of longer term but not immediately urgent projects I need to tackle. Now, to be clear, these are not all actually annoying. For instance, in September I did need to get the numbers for my business taxes (annoying!). But I also did stuff like register for 2027 sleep away camp, and book hotels for a future trip. Those aren’t annoying things, it’s just that the many steps themselves can be annoying. I’ve been listing these out in a little corner on my weekly planning pages, and then moving forward what I haven’t done. I don’t actually intend to do all of them on any given week, which is why they are not on my actual priority list (just in a tiny corner!). But I try to choose one each week and by seeing all of them I know my options. This month I’m ordering Christmas cards, getting my ring fixed, renewing my drivers’ license, putting my annual deposit into my self-employed 401k, and a few other things.
Anyway, I’m trying to take some time at the end of each month to reflect on the month and look forward. September was a good transition month after my August month of being away from home from August 9-27 (minus three hours) and also gone Aug 1-2, plus 31st. By contrast, I only spent three nights of September in hotels!
The month started in NYC, where I got up and ran around Central Park. That was a treat — I also then recorded a few video interviews about Big Time (my most recent book, please check it out if you haven’t!). This has been helpful as I’ve been able to post some video clips over on Instagram. I keep saying I should do more video…and then other people did it for me. Efficiency!
The first part of the month also featured the Melissa Etheridge concert at Longwood Gardens. It was a beautiful late summer night and it was fun to spend time with my now-17-year-old. He was a very good sport about going to a concert where he was not exactly the target demographic. He joked about buying merch and wearing it to school.
I camped out in the yard with my two little boys over Labor Day weekend. Then we went to go apple picking — and found few apples to pick. So we picked flowers and got donuts instead. I would still call that a successful adventure. I ate a lot of Honeycrisp apples in September either way!
School started on September 8th (late!). We have mostly figured out the schedule at this point. It is always a work in progress the first few weeks, but it is starting to feel more routine. A few more things will be added shortly, but others will end (baseball/cross-country/flag football). We celebrated the start of the school year with a family dinner at the Melting Pot.
Speaking of meals, my husband and I also had a fun omakase dinner to celebrate our anniversary (22 years). We took the 17-year-old and a friend to Provenance for a birthday dinner and enjoyed their tasting menu later in the month.
I went to Portland, Maine for a few days to gather with some other writers and content creators. I’ve been to Portland in early fall for six years now, and the place is starting to feel very familiar. This was a fun time as always, including three runs along the water front in the morning. Plus I learned how to weave as a fun bonus activity!
I ran the September Reset Time Tracking Challenge and had over a thousand people tracking their time for the week (Sept 14-20). I am still working through the logs people sent me, but the reason this is slow going is that they are FASCINATING. I love my readers. Truly. I particularly love seeing the cool things people are doing in their “Golden Hours.”
As for Golden Hours (the next book), I have a rough draft. It is on the shorter side, but I’ll be putting in information and stories from the challenge over the next few weeks which will make it more substantial. There will also be a reasonable number of time logs in the back. My original book due date was October 1st, so I guess I did finish a draft by then — but now the deadline is January 15th, so I’m looking forward to playing around with the draft a bit more.
Other than that, there were a lot kids’ sports and activities and driving. My two choirs started up and I’m enjoying singing regularly again. There have been some challenges, not all of which are blog-worthy — I know this is the problem of writing about your life and having older kids. Some transitions to the school year have been rougher than others. But we are chugging along.
Looking forward to October…It is a pretty stunning month around here once the fall colors are more prominent (which tends to happen somewhere between October 15-20 and peaks right around the end of the month).
I have a few things I suspect will be highlights already on the books. My daughter will celebrate her birthday early in the month. She asked for a guitar and is getting one — I’m excited for her to learn to play that and add another instrument to her repertoire. We may go to an Eagles game — at least that is the plan, and I am excited about that as long as the weather isn’t terrible. I’m going to Nashville to see my college kid! He’s been enjoying Vanderbilt so far and is really getting himself plugged in there (he joined a choir and got a position working at a lab). I will sing in my first concert of the fall, which will feature the Chichester Psalms. And then there will be lots of Halloween festivities, including a Halloween music recital in which the 6-year-old will perform a self-composed piece about bats. Professionally, I hope to have a pretty well-revised draft of Golden Hours by the end of the month. Wish me luck!
