It’s grey and blustery today, very Pooh-and-the-Hundred-Acre-Wood like. I have all four critters curled up on the futon in my study. Tuck as appropriated the biggest pillow to sleep on. Tuck loves him some pillow. Bunny inches closer and closer to my legs until I find myself perched on the edge, and send him back to his spot. At which point the whole process starts again. The cats sleep on, oblivious.

Lamby cake to be sacrificed at Easter
We don’t celebrate Easter now, but I am always swamped in memories of what Easter was like when I was a kid. The importance of the clothes in pastel colors, and gloves. We wore gloves to church on Easter Sunday, believe it or not, with our bell-like taffeta skirts. One year I remember it turned very cold on Easter, but we didn’t have coats to match our new dresses and so we ran, shivering, the three blocks to St Benedict’s and then shivering even more on the way home again. I remember a hat flying away on the wind. I remember the pound cake in the shape of a lamb with coconut frosting, called, appropriately enough, lamby cake. I remember jelly beans, which I really disliked, and those neon orange circus peanut candies, which made my stomach turn. And that’s about it. That’s what Easter means to me, unless you want to talk about Lent and the Stations of the Cross. I have never done hallucinogenics, but those memories seem to me outlandish and exaggerated and pretty much what it must be like to indulge.
Today we have no pound cake in the shape of a lamb, and I’m not even sure what we’ll have for supper. But it’s warm and cozy in the house and I have lots of interesting things to read (too many, truth be told).
And then this morning a very nice surprise. The Coffee Time Romance people have given The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square a CTRR reward. You can read Kimberly’s review (five coffee cups!) here.
Finally, via Charlotte, a manifesto from people who think like I want to think:
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you’re done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more
Well for sure, done is the engine of more. I’ve come to believe in the karma of done: get things done, or talk about how much you are doing, and more will be at your door to do. Put another way: you want something done, put a busy person in charge.
I do balk at ‘throw it away’ once you’re done. That, I have a heckuva hard time with.
Done…is a happy place to be. So many times i have put something off again and again, then finally I get it done and feel on a high all day because I have put the job behind me. often it is not as big a job as I had expected anyway. I do like “done”
I do like the “fake it till you make it idea” and this works in many ways in life. it takes a bit of self discipline but it really does work.
What an excellent review! Congrats.
My son recently asked us what super power we would want. Mine was to get all the things I want done – done … finishing the first draft of the book, learning to play guitar (which I haven’t even started yet), packing the house for the upcoming move. So the Manifesto is something I can use.
On a side note, was able to log in no problem today.
I explain to the potential gardeners in my seminars that I garden by the Michaelangelo method. After I’ve tried to do something every possible wrong way, what’s left is the right way to do it.
Actually, that’s pretty much the way I do everything.
What, we’re supposed to log in? I didn’t know that.