Time For A Change?

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

New Year's is a natural time for new beginnings. I mean, who hasn't made a New Year's Resolution... or two or three... But don't worry. This isn't a post about how this is the year I'm resolving to make the NYT list, finally finish redecorating my office and get down to a size six. (Not that any or all of them wouldn't be nice, but... let's face it, I am a realist.)

No, after years of doing my Classic and Cozy blog on the first Thursday of the month, there has been a rescheduling and now my day is the first Monday. I'm grateful to still be a part of the Classic and Cozy family, and sometimes a little shakeup is a good thing.

So - mark your calendars (I've already marked mine) and be prepared for first Mondays from now on. At least, until the next rescheduling.

And now about new beginnings - while New Year's is a handy peg on which to hang changes and resolutions, it's not the only one. Every day is a new beginning. You can make resolutions about whatever you want on any day of the year. In my youth there used to be a poster which said "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" or something like that, and that's really true. Time is an ongoing circle, with one day following another. Weeks, months, days, years... those are man-made divisions.

So - I say any time of year, an day is a good day to follow your dream. Want to write a new kind of book? Or plan (or take!) a special trip? Or dye your hair? Or start a healthier eating plan? Or... whatever. Why wait for a certain day to do it? Now is what counts. Somewhere in an email I saw this wonderful phrase "There is no day called someday." I don't know who has it as part of their sig line - and I wish I did, because I would certainly give that very wise person credit!

My grandmother always used to say, "Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today." I really kind of believe she meant it more in the sense of cleaning my room and getting chores done, but the wisdom holds true into following your dreams as well. Time will always pass. What you do with it is your choice.

Happy New Year, everyone! And - this year, may all your dreams come true.

Too Much To Do--Not Enough Time

by Fran McNabb

It’s that time of the year again—shopping, baking, holiday parties, traveling, wrapping gifts—that

time of the year when the mind becomes a blur and down-time is nonexistent. Is there a way to get through it and still find the enjoyment that is meant to be?

When I was a working mom, I seemed to handle the stress of the holidays much better. Maybe I was more organized. Let’s face it. When a person has the responsibility of work and family, organization is essential. Now that I’m retired, you’d think there would be more time to do the things that I want to do and things that need to be done and less stress associated with it. Nope. Not true.

Now that I am no longer a fulltime teacher and a mom with growing boys, I do cherish my time at home, but that doesn’t mean I’m any more organized and ready for the holidays. Why is that? Do other women (and men) experience the same frenzy that I find myself in during the holidays?

Is it because we try to do too much because we have the time to do it? Is it because others expect more of us? I think it’s because my brain is still active (that’s a good thing) and thinks my body is still young and able to do all it wants to do. I’ll make a confession: I’m at the end of my sixth decade, but I do sometimes forget that. I’m an author and I still have all these wonderful plans for more books to write, contests to enter, blogs to write, edits to do, and on and on, but when it comes down to it, I can’t do it all, or maybe I just don’t have the energy to do it all.

So at this time of the year when everyone is rushing around, I think we all need to take inventory of the things in our lives that need to be done or want to do. Whether it’s finishing that next manuscript or actually having our Christmas list finished early, maybe a little organization and realization of what we can do is needed.

Can’t finish something? Don’t stress. Decide what's important. Rewrite your list of to-do-chores and do only those things that are necessary. Christmas is a time of joy. Don’t let stress take that joy away.

FRAN MCNABB writes sweet romance, with eight books available and four “searching for a home.” Her first book, A LIGHT IN THE DARK , is a Christmas themed story set in the mountains of W. Virginia. It was published in 2006 by Avalon Publishing and is now available through Montlake Publishing. http://a.co/cqVPhQO .Visit Fran at www.FranMcNabb.com or at mcnabbf@bellsouth.net.

 

The Value of Time

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

Sometimes we continue to love our friends not for what they are, but in spite of what they are. I have a dear friend, one who I’ve known for a dozen years or more, one who has always been there for me, one who is just a good person in general. She is kind, funny and unfailingly generous, and I am blessed to have her in my life and want to keep her as a friend for as long as I live. Best of all, our husbands even like each other!

Except...

She has absoutely no concept of time. None. She has several beautiful watches, but I’m not quite sure she knows how to use any of them. She has never made any appointment on time. Any. Her late mother once confided in me that she was even born ten days late. After the first year or two - after I realized her tardyness was totally incurable - I stopped trying to change her, as she refused to accept that she had any kind of problem, saying that time didn’t matter that much. Well, maybe not to her, but I live on such a tight schedule that it was very important to me. I didn’t want to lose her friendship, and we had several arguments about the problem. So… I just lied. If we were to meet at lunch at 12 noon, I told her that we would meet at 11:30, and thus she nearly always manages to show up no later than 12:10 or 12:15. It’s a system that works well for both of us,... as long as she doesn’t know I’ve jiggered the time.

This is just about the only point on which we disagree; she feels that time is an artificial construct to which one should not be enslaved. I feel that to ignore time - especially when it wastes another’s time - is to show disrespect for the other person, in effect saying that their time is unimportant. Of course, I was trained by my father, who was a martinet about time and manners.

Most of my life my parents owed a well-respected advertising agency. I started working for them when I was nine. Deadlines are an important part of any media-based business (actually of any business) and I was raised that to miss a deadline was a sin, if not just about the worst sin one could commit. That training served me well in my subsequent careers in journalism and writing novels, and drove me crazy the decade I worked with actors. (It is amazing that some of  the flakier ones of them survived!) I would sooner commit a felony than miss a deadline.

Of course, as I live in a very large city where the bad traffic is legendary, sometimes even if you build in time for travel something happens and you’re stuck for X amount of time. That’s part of life in the big city and you accept it. It just doesn’t happen every time you meet someone for lunch, though! (And that’s where cell phones are a blessing.)

If my friend were this consistently tardy just with me, I wouldn’t call her a friend, no matter how sweet or funny she was. She is this way with everyone and everything. Her husband says she was even late for their wedding, and quite honestly I don’t know if he’s kidding or not!

So, being a believer that you play with what you’re dealt, I go on lying about our meeting times and, since I bought a tablet that fits cozily in my purse, have managed to get a good deal of writing done while waiting. So much so, in fact, that I might start considering telling her the actual lunch times!

(You might have noticed that I'm blogging on a different day. A re-scheduling of our Classic and Cozy blog roster has moved me from first Wednesday to first Thursday. So - look for me here every month at this same time.)

Time Flies

by Fran McNabb

The dog days of summer are upon us. No, let me rephrase that. The dog days of summer have been with us for a couple of months. This has been a very hot summer. My husband and I sit out in the afternoon and evenings to enjoy the harbor activity or to enjoy the company of neighbors. This summer we’ve spent more and more afternoon inside in air conditioning.

Maybe the weather is hotter this year, or maybe we’re just getting older and the heat affects us more. The second explanation is probably the correct one. We are getting older and as we go from one year to the next, it seems the summers are hotter and the days are flying faster than they did in the years past.

My mom used to say that as we age, the years go faster. I never paid much attention to that—until now.

We had the privilege of having our five-year-old grandson at the beginning of the summer. His birthday is the last day of August which makes all the others in his class older than he is. One day out of the blue he looked at me with a sad-sack face. “McMama, I’ll never be six.” I started to tell him he was being silly, but then, I realized that for him time isn’t passing as fast as it is for me. Getting to be six is the biggest worry his little mind has right now, and to him, the three months ahead were endless.

Yes, time flies as we get older. We clutter our minds with family matters, financial worries, career problems and on and on and on. As I look back at a simpler time in our lives—when our greatest worry was as simple as a birthday—I realize that youth and simplicity was a state of bliss.

That six-year-old birthday party was celebrated early this year, and at the party I heard the little

fellow tell a friend, “I’m not six yet.” I didn’t say anything though I wanted to say that his real birthday would be here before he knew it, and before he could blink an eye he’d be an adult celebrating graduations, births, and anniversaries with his own family. I hope these future celebrations will be as anticipated and as wonderful as his “real six-year-old birthday.”

Yes, time does seem to fly, but I hope as adults we can still feel the innocent excitement we once felt in childhood.

 

FRAN MCNABB and her husband have two sons and two grandsons and have enjoyed watching these young men experience life as they mature. She writes sweet romances and loves including children in her books. Visit her at www.FranMcNabb.com or at mcnabbf@bellsouth.net.