Stacks

Forgive me, father. It's been two months since my last confession update. When I was in high school, I had a computer science teacher who tried to describe a stack (the data structure, that is). Her first analogy about a stack of lunch trays in the cafeteria didn't work. The "A-Ha!" moment for me came when she was describing how to recursively move through a stack. "Have you ever been cleaning your house," she asked. "And you go to another room looking for something to help you tidy up the first room? And then you notice something in the second room that needs to be straightened up before you can return to the first room?" I got it.

Unfortunately, my personal life feels like I've got an unmanageable stack right now.  I'm working my way through it, but it's frustrating.  Here's a slice of the stack right now.

I want to play my guitar.  Before I can do that, I need to unpack all my music gear in the basement.  Before I can unpack all my music gear, I have to put walls up in the basement because if I unpack before I put walls up, I'll have to pack everything back up so stuff can be out of the way while we work on the framing and drywall.  Before I can put walls up in the basement, I need to figure out when my brother in law Jimmy can help me with it.  Before I can do that, Jimmy has to finish patching all the holes we made when we replaced the air conditioning.

There's a lot more.  It seems like every project has some sort of dependency that's keeping me from getting to it.  Like once Jimmy is done patching holes and spackling, I should probably paint all the walls downstairs.  But we ought not to do that before we have everyone over for Christmas, lest I create a mess that can't be cleaned up before everyone gets there.

In this way, every time I have free time at home, I feel anxiety because there is a metric assload of things that need to be done, but most of them can't be done until something else is done first.  Some days, I feel like saying "Damn the order in which things should be done."  Maybe I should just break into the middle of the stack in the interest of getting stuff done.

I will have a week between Christmas and New Year's, where I can take some time to address some projects and maybe cut the stack down.  We'll see.

Speaking of free time, there isn't much of it.  So there's not a heck of a lot to report when it comes to new personal developments.  I'm still very happy spending time with my family, but sometimes feel like I'm stuck in second gear and can't get into third, because I'm the type of person who needs to feel like he's always making progress on multiple fronts in order to feel fulfilled.

It helps to have a wonderful wife and an amazingly cute daughter.  Here's a recent pic.

I showed this pic to a client recently.  She said "She looks like Cindy Lou Who!" (from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas).  Funny, because someone stopped my wife a few weeks ago in a store and said the same thing.

I should learn to take it easy and count my blessings.