hmph.

(a clandestine at-work post, because I just have to get this out of my head)

To my dismay, I'm finding that I'm spending a lot of time when I'm not at work stewing about work. So it feels like I'm almost always working. Which in turn feels like time is just flying by.

One of my biggest causes of stress in life -- and you can ask Rob what I'm like when I feel rushed -- is not having enough time to do all the things that I want or need to do. That, plus the fact that my to-do list tends, even on weekends, to be quite long. My list of chores and tasks to do last Saturday morning before Dad and Ellen arrived for a Father's Day visit was really quite ridiculous, and I spent the first hour after they got here scurrying around trying to finish things up.

When I took the Predictive Index personality-type study a couple of years ago, I came out as a "High C" among the four drives: A=to dominate; B=to induce positive response; C=for stability; D= for certainty. Here are the likely behaviors of a High C: to be methodical, to do one thing at a time, to finish a task before moving on, to be patient, to be process-driven, to be persistent, to be a creature of habit, to be focused, to fare less well under pressure, to be reactive.

Yep, that's me.

So this constant fretting about work, plus a full calendar in the coming months (meetings and big projects for work, vacation, not to mention the things I want to do, like taking an afternoon by the pool and spending a weekend with Bill) are making my heart race and my shoulders crunch. My deep and abiding fear is that I don't have time for the things I want to do, and that these next few months -- summer, my very favorite time of year -- will slip out from underneath me.

This makes me extremely sad.