May 13...or...Time...I feel like I have none of it.

So this blogging "every day in May" thing turned out to be anything but.  Then I thought maybe I would do a "blog almost every day in May," but I'm not really succeeding in that either.  So I decided that I'm going to change it to "blog more in May."  I think I can do that.  

Blogging every day takes up a lot of time.  Committing to any one thing every day takes up a lot of time.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have trouble committing to two face washings, two teeth brushings, and one flossing a day, and those three things don't take all that long.  I think it's partly because they don't take very long that it's easy for me to ignore their significance in my daily life.  It's only when I wake up in the morning to a face full of pimples, or get a full hour of scraping in the dentist's chair that I realize how all those little minutes add up eventually.  

I drove to the Twin Cities today to go to my storage unit and to pick up some clothes I was having tailored.  Yes, it makes no sense that I still have a storage unit in Minneapolis, or that the only tailor I trust anymore happens to also be up there...I'm sure if I looked around Rochester I could find a tailor, and probably a more affordable storage unit.  But again...it takes time to find something new, especially when I already have something reliable, albeit a little inconvenient.  Round trip from Eyota, I was gone about 4 hours.  That's pretty good!  I made it from my front door in Eyota to the NE Tailor in NE Minneapolis in an hour and a half.  However, because I have a tailor and a storage unit in Minneapolis, that was four hours of my day that I could have spent doing something else.  In fact, I had plans to get a lot of things done today at a leisurely pace, since packing up for a move can be stressful if everything is left to the last minute.  I had wanted to sleep in today, but I had to bathe the dogs, finish packing my bags, shop for road food, prepare the road food, pack the car, finish packing the trailer, eat, drink, use the bathroom, shower, brush my teeth, floss my teeth (try not to gag while flossing), exercise, breathe, check Facebook, eat again, drink more water, make some phone calls...and on it goes.  So I woke up at 7 this morning and started my long list of things to do.  And somehow I managed to finish all of them (except the exercising and the not-gagging) and still have time to sit down and blog a bit.  I even had time for Dancing with the Stars.  I'm exhausted.  4am is going to come awfully early...and I'm already looking forward to a Starbucks stop in Des Moines at 7am.  Hahaha!      

I remember randomly coming across a quote years ago that said "Time = Money."  And I think about that a lot.  I think about it when I'm at the gas pump, particularly one that runs a little more expensive than the others.  Do I take the time to drive to another gas station to save three cents a gallon?  I have, at most, a 22 gallon gas tank.  At three cents a gallon, if my car was running on fumes, I would save 66 cents by going out of my way to the cheaper gas station.  In essence, not only would it take up more of my time to save 66 cents, but I would probably spend the savings and then some in gas just getting to the station with the cheaper gas.  So I don't gas station hop.  And I always fill up the tank.  I would rather pay more for gas all at one time, than drive around and stop more often for the cheaper stuff.  Not everyone operates that way.  Sometimes it's the principal of the thing.

But I do have to ask myself...how much is my time worth?  I remember seeing an equation to figure out just how much your time is worth, based on your hourly salary for your job.  I don’t remember how it went, so it’s not really all that useful that I mentioned it at all, but I think about it sometimes.  My time is actually pretty valuable, at least it is to me.  I wish I had more of it.  I was just off work for 3 months and I still find myself wishing that I had had more time.  There were still people that I didn’t get to see in those three months.  You think you have all the time in the world, but it’s gone before you know it.  

Case in point, I should have finished this and posted it yesterday.  But I ran out of time.  So here it is today.  It probably doesn’t make all that much sense, since it’s a day behind, but I’m really trying to stay on top of this blogging thing, so there you go.  

Until next time...