La Bene Vita

It's a Day

This is ridiculous. I don't know if it's the Parkinson's or just general malaise, but I'm off my game today. My shoulders and trunk are swaying with dyskinesia. I can't focus. I've started and restarted this post probably a dozen times, but I'm determined to write something, to document why I didn't achieve today's goal, if nothing else.

Today's Goal
Today is supposed to be "The Bradbury Thursdays" - meaning, I have a short story to write. I know, today isn't over, and the story may still happen. I want it to happen. But...

The Problem (Maybe?)
I slept poorly most of the week until last night. According to my watch, I went to sleep at 22:00 (always my goal, but it almost never happens) and woke up at 8:07, which is more than 10 hours - but my watch claims I was awake for 2 hours of that. I'm not sure I believe it. But even 8 hours, if that's what it was, is a vast improvement from the 4-5 hrs per night earlier this week. So why is my watch giving me a sleep score of 66 (is that a D or a D- these days? Does my watch grade on a curve?)

Meanwhile, my energy score is 79, and my watch offered this weird advice: "Your active time yesterday was 33 minutes, which is higher than your recent average of 11 minutes. This excess activity could lead to injury. Consider reducing today's active time to 10 minutes..."

Reality
Per advice from Robert Waltz , I have alarms set at 9:05 AM (noveling) and 9:50 AM (blogging). I set a deadline of 12:00 noon to complete any daily writing tasks. I met zero of those deadlines today.

My specific to-dos for today were: add a novel chapter; write a short story (The Bradbury); blog about short story.

Novel Chapter: I played with formatting in Google Drive and posted about it on the NF. No new chapter yet today.

Short Story: I worked on the Prize Prompt for PromptMaster! "

Week 3 Prompts Jan 19 - 25 2026"  , and by that I mean, I researched earthquakes and brainstormed all kinds of possible angles for tackling the prompt. The Task Prompt is already complete - "The Money Pit" . While neither of these are listed in my official goals, I feel like it's writing, so I should get credit. On the other hand. it also feels like procrastination.

Noon Deadline: This is to force me to stop writing tasks (because writing is a hobby) and turn my focus to the music school (which is my livelihood and the livelihoods of all my employees), but I direct you to my aforementioned lack of focus today. So here I am blogging at 3:19 PM when I should be reviewing payroll, promoting Saturday's Winter Benefit Concert (if we don't get snowed out), working on the Bureau of Workers Comp pre-audit questionnaire...

Crap. I should probably go do that one.

If I get a short story out today, I'll be amazed. But now you know why, and a year from now, I'll remember.