Three more things.

Today I woke up very early. Very early for a Saturday, anyway. It's nerves, and an over-active mind. I'm trying to process the fact that I leave for India in hours, and it's not really working out so well.

Anyway, in keeping with the three-things theme, I'll give you three more tidbits before a week of silence. The first tidbit is this article/video that I read/saw with Irene Rosenfeld, the CEO of Kraft. She's saying that you can't do it all. You have to make choices. Decide what's important for you and then do that, but realize that you are going to miss certain things, and be okay with that. This is in the context of having a "work-life balance," which maybe doesn't exist, because maybe the scales aren't always evenly weighted. And you know something? I agree with her. I do, actually, and I think that there are many people I know who don't agree with her, who feel that you can have a balance with everything and who think that you can do it all. Work, parent, volunteer, have hobbies and you-time, have a successful marriage. What I believe is that yes, you can do all of those things, but you won't be doing any of them very well, and some of them, if not all of them, will suffer for it. Probably a controversial statement with all the women I know, but I stand by it. For me, this is true. If I tried to do all of those things, and all of those things at once, I would not be performing any of those functions at the level of success that I would want. And I would be stretched too thin. I can't do everything. I have to make choices. I will always have to make choices. And I have to be okay with those choices.

Okay, moving on from that. Doug and I got new glasses. Kind-of on a whim, but it's a good thing because our prescriptions had changed from last year. We must be getting old, because each time we see the eye doctor our vision gets worse and worse. Pretty soon we'll be in bifocals and we'll be having discussions about the benefit of progressive lenses. So far, though, we still only really need the glasses for distance vision. Doug stuck to his old-faithful computer-geek style and I decided to go with a variation on the Harry Potter theme. What would be really different is if Doug and I both decided to nix the glasses and get contacts. Can you imagine a world in which Doug and I do not wear glasses? I can't. Too scary.

There was a third thing that I was going to write about, a real third thing, but I forget. So I'll just make something up. I'll write about how cold it is in my house right now. 54 degrees. It's about 38 degrees outside, so 54 is comparatively warm, but still. It's cold. I am wearing two fleeces, a hat, and if I owned fingerless gloves that would allow me to type I'd be wearing those, too. I could just turn on the heat, I guess, but I have a fear of turning on the heat here before our furnace has been serviced for the season. What if it breaks? What if the furnace explodes? These are the things I worry about. So until the furnace guy comes, which won't be until sometime in November, we're layering up.

I won't need these layers when I'm in India, though. It's warm there. It's also time to finally pack and get this party started. I have a small list of things to go and buy (like a neck pillow for the plane and Imodium for, well, other issues), and then I have to gather all the gadgets that are charging (like the laptop, Blackberry, nook, and camera...), but then I should be pretty set. It's a bit unreal. I'm not really prepared in my mind to go. In body I am, in mind I am not. It's going to be quite the trip.