Well, I've gone and done it. I've found a way to neutralize my organizer as a tool to keep me on track. I realized it when I clicked through the list of things to do and discovered that this blog entry is a week overdue, and the earliest tasks that I skipped over are nearly two weeks behind.

I had been increasingly annoyed with having to keep editing some entries that hadn't been done to keep them up with the next day's schedule. My schedule was getting longer as the gardening planting dates for later spring crops started joining the early ones faster than the earliest ones left when their last planting day was past. A few late frosts and lots of rain had delayed planting the seedlings and the task of carrying them in for the night had become quite a chore.

As I carried them in last night, I decided to check the organizer again to see if it was close enough to the tomato planting date to risk setting more out. The pepper planting date is about two weeks beyond that, a safer date for cold-sensitive plants, but the tomato planting date is reasonable for most things. As I paged down the list, I noticed how long ago the first dates were from the present date. I also realized that the organizer had stopped its steady beeping during the day, with only a few beeps easily missed if I wasn't taking it around the house with me.

A little thought explained the obvious problem. I had stopped forwarding the undone tasks as an experiment to see just how many of them were being skipped and to estimate just how overloaded my schedule was. The organizer does not beep for tasks not scheduled for that day. My schedule was turned inside out with only a few necessary tasks making it to the next day. Everything else was trailing behind me, even many planting dates. AARGH!

It hadn't helped that this week I had to help Mom get a new car. Her old one finally wore out, driven to the last mile to be squeezed out without a repair job that would cost three times what the car was worth. I spent a good deal of time checking on deals on the Internet, looking for the miraculously cheap used car that Steve insisted must be out there. We finally went to the local dealership that had coddled the old car along and snapped up a good used car after about ten minutes of consideration and arguments.

So now I am trying to figure out what to do about this schedule. I've got some stuff coming up in the garden and some nice tomato and flower seedlings almost ready to go out in about a week, so most of the available bed space is filled or reserved for warm weather crops awaiting transplant in the next few weeks. I finished the third sweater and have the front of the fourth sweater almost done, and that will be enough sweaters to mail the box and declare that project done.

I'm thinking that I might leave a lot of the projects behind while I finish up this pressing spring planting and the sweater project. The organizer won't beep as often, but I can't fit everything in while there is so much work to do on spring planting. Live plants won't wait and seeds in the packet won't sprout, so there isn't much leeway on them.

The drawback is that that is how the flannel quilt got left behind. It is still sitting in its bag underneath the star quilt, which does at least get some quilting done on it occasionally. Even the fabric.com sales aren't giving me enough incentive to get caught up, despite the occasional visit to drool over their beautiful goodies.

There is one other thing that is giving me fair warning that the organizer may not be enough. The spring crop of weeds is coming up and the new rows not only need to be thinned, they need to be weeded as well. Weeds like compost as much as vegetables and flowers do!

Still, the garden is flourishing like I've never seen it grow before. The roses that got lots of compost last year are thickly leafed out, a remarkable contrast to a poor rose that I found buried under a deutzia that still needs more pruning. That rose has hardly any leaves on it, so it will get some compost as soon as more is ready. The new fig tree has lots of fat green buds swelling along its trunk as well.

The tumblers are gobbling up paper and scraps at a fairly good clip now. The process is not going as quickly as in the heat of summer and the paper strips are tending to ball up, but there is a definite promise of compost for the garden fairly soon. I have a good supply of shredded paper ready to go, so tumbler care is back on the list of morning tasks.