Getting my shit together summary of day 1.

Well, progress was made. I managed to get most my ticky boxes yesterday.

I didn’t make it to bed by midnight, as I didn’t get home from bookclub followed by grocery shopping until close to 11, and then there just wasn’t enough time to do things and still make it to bed on time.

I didn’t do the neck thing, because to even get to bed at a reasonable hour required some level of give on what I had left to do at the end of the day, and I haven’t done the neck thing in quite a awhile, so I figured it was expendable.

I didn’t make it a day without Q-tipping my ears because part of my 15 minutes of cleaning was putting back all the stuff that came out of my bathroom and storage room for the renovations and I came across an old stash of Q-tips I didn’t know I had, and my sub-conscious overpowered my brain and stabbed one in my ears.

I’ve thrown the rest of them away, so hopefully that’ll be the last of that for awhile.

Swabbing…

I had to go upstairs to turn the furnace on (for the first time this year, brrr), and while I was up there, my will power evaporated and I grabbed a couple of Q-tips from my landlady’s stash.

Ewww!

My ears were more disgusting than I’d ever thought possible.

Now I can’t decided if I never want to swab them again just so I never have to see that nastiness again. Or if I want to go back to swabbing them all the time so they never get that nasty again.

And just to repeat:

Ewww!

Reason #6.1: Because CuteOverload maks my brain asplud

Apparently Q-tip fluff comes from this: http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/09/veera-j.html

And this: http://www.konalaejapanesespitz.com/8W-9.JPG

And it would be wrong to steal fluffy from puppies.

Argh.

Oh. My. God. The. Ear. Itching.

I’d happily run up 10 flights of stairs for a Q-tip right now.

Ticky box!

I had two ‘negative’ goals on Joe’s Goals — snoozing and swabbing my ears.

In theory, positive goals are things you’re trying to do, like going to the gym, while negative goals are things you’re trying not to do, like hit the snooze button. In practice, though, it’s must more satisfying to not let yourself hit the snooze button and then give yourself a nice little happy face in your ticky box than it is to just leave a box blank.

So I flipped those goals around (and probably messed up changing all the old entries around, but oh, well) to make them positive goals so I could give myself ticky marks for achieving them instead of not giving myself ticky marks for achieving them. It’s just more logical that way.

Q-tips: More dangerous than you ever thought possible…

Penn (of Penn & Teller): Listen to Me, I Can’t Hear You

Dr Jacques Ramsay, Coronor: A cotton swab in the ear can kill

ARGH.

Want Q-tip!

Want!

Q-tip!

…I would keep my fingers out of my ears

I have a longstanding Q-tip problem.

I know that you’re not supposed to put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear, but that’s never stopped me from swabbing my ears out with Q-tips, and doing it a lot.

What did make me stop was the realization that my Q-tip habit was probably the source of many of my hearing problems.

I’m struggling with quitting the Q-tips, though. It’s a surprisingly tough addiction to crack. I’ve got it down from a couple of times a day to every couple of weeks, just based on not keeping them in my house at all. The only source of them here is to walk up four flights of stairs to my landlady’s bathroom and use one of hers. And four flights of stairs is a pretty strong deterrent.

At my brother’s house on the weekend, though, there was a whole big shiny nearly full box with the top removed just sitting on top of the toilet. Right there. In easy reach. Where I saw it every time I used the bathroom.

Relapse!

So, this week’s new thing is a non-activity. I’m simply going to start a chain of not swabbing out my ears with Q-tips.