The Birth of the Points

I had quit my job.

My stable, secure, well-paying job that was keeping me from sleeping, relaxing or maintaining a systolic blood pressure of less than 130.

I was trying to launch a home-business. Which turned out to be several orders of magnitude more difficult than I thought it would be. Because I am always clever about grotesquely underestimating the time/effort/money/energy/natural resources/donuts necessary to accomplish big tasks. This may be a protective mechanism because if my brain really understood what it was getting into when I do these things, it is far more likely that I would make a cozy little nest for myself under the bed and only come out once a year to see if I could see any gray hair, thereby predicting 51 more weeks of take-out dinners.

So my time was completely absorbed with the learning how to be self-employed, developing the infrastructure of a home-based speech pathology business and the half-time job that I kept so I could do this all without borrowing any money and continuing to pay my share of our household expenses so as to keep us from living under a bridge or in a box.

Along the way, a few things fell by the wayside.

Here is a partial list of the things that by the wayside fell:

• cooking
• cleaning
• grocery shopping
• dusting
• disposing of junk mail
• putting away of things
• emptying the dish drainer
• speaking in complete sentence
• donning matching socks

My home – in which I had taken tremendous pride, put in copious amount of time, blood, sweat, tears and broken fingernails – was becoming grimy, cluttered, dysfunctional and inefficient. I couldn’t find bills I was supposed to pay, checks I was supposed to deposit, children I was supposed to feed  or husbands I was supposed to recognize.

One night I was standing in the family room, furiously shoving aside a pile of clutter that contained mail of various legitimacy, unread books, iPod cables and potentially the progeny of the Lindbergh baby. And as I waded through the mounds in search of anything that might possibly resemble the fabric on my sofa, I spied my Martha Stewart Living magazine peeking out from between a Fuji’s Treats catalogue and the owner’s manual for a Moen faucet (because it is entirely possible that without the manual you will not be able to figure out the complex mechanics of turning the water on or – heaven forbid – off.)

And I stood in the family room, pointing accusingly at, well, my life – which at the time was being played by a massive pile of random crap with an attitude and sporting a full set of looming “late payment” dates – and declared, “I would not get any points for this! Martha would NOT give me any points for this! Martha would give me negative points for this!”

And a concept was born.

The concept turned into an idea.

And the idea turned into a blog.

So here we all are.

Hello!

PS – This is my 200th post!