My mind has always been my Achilles' heel.

I'm not allowed to tell the internet exactly how long 'til Randy comes home. Let's just say that it's somewhere between vacuum the dog hair off the bed and shave my legs time. In other words, really kinda close. Which makes me unutterably happy, but also compels me to plan the hell out of the next few months.

First of all, I have to have a plan for vacuuming the aforementioned dog hair. Yes, I do. If I don't have a plan, how can I procrastinate?! Stay focused, people! So, there is the "Get the House Ready for His Return Plan," which is less about impressing my husband with my housekeeping skills (he has, after all, been living with me for a while now and is much harder to fool) and more about establishing a baseline of cleanliness so that I can bitch about how messy our house is later.

This is important - the more attention I draw to the massive undertaking of tidying up, the more likely it is that I'll be excused from cooking and treated to a dinner out instead.

Next, I signed up for NaNoWriMo for the month of November, and this also takes a rather lot of planning. Not planning for the novel, oh no, I plan to jump into that pretty much cold turkey.

But speaking of cold turkey, I need to plan on having plenty of that on hand for my family so they don't starve. We probably won't be going out that much because I won't be complaining very much about housework. Because I won't be doing it much. Or at all.

Donna Reed I am not, but I can probably swing Erma Bombeck.

After that is Christmas, and we'll hopefully be spending it as far south in Europe as possible to take advantage of sun and off-season prices. Our original plan was Greece, but the consensus is that Greece is pretty much closed for the winter, so we're going to try for Spain or the Canary Islands instead. More planning is needed.

Shortly on the heels of Christmas is the Battalion Ball which I cannot escape am planning to attend this year. I already have my dress - a fancy black and white strapless thing with a big ol' skirt and a very retro vibe. Accordingly, I'm planning on swinging a 1950s Marilyn Monroe type hairdo with some 1940s Rosalind Russell type makeup (minus the Kewpie Doll lashes).

(I'd show you some pictures, but apparently there is no such thing as a royalty-free picture of Marilyn Monroe.) 

This takes an immense amount of planning because these days I'm lucky if I shower, let alone do my hair and makeup.

Thank Dog for YouTube tutorials.