Tying up undone ends

In six days, my 101 in 1001 experiment comes to an end. When I began it, I truly, fully believed I would accomplish every single item on the list. In fact, I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to even need 1001 days to finish it up. I was thinking I'd be done in two years (that's 730 days for those folks not willing to do math).

But then...

I decided to go back to graduate school (while still maintaining my full-time job and sometimes an additional part-time job) AND

I got pregnant and had a baby (who is now Destructo-Toddler).

So... yeah. There went my ability to do things in my free time because there went all of my free time! So, somewhat sadly, I didn't get to finish my 101 items. But I want to close out the list so I'm going to wrap up the undone items.

Here are some items that really couldn't be wrapped up until this little to-do was near its end but that I now considered successfully completed:

30. Do not get coffee to go (i.e. Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts) more than once per workweek.
44. Blog at least three days a week. (I may have missed one or two here and there, especially lately, but I consider this definitely completed successfully.)
50. Maintain a blog that talks about the 101 in 1001 project through the end of the project.
52. Blog about each completed item.

Out of 101 items, I completed 41. As an academic, that means I have to fail myself. (Insert "wah-wah" fail noise here.) But I don't consider this experiment a failure by any means; quite the opposite, in fact - I have learned a lot through the process.

One lesson made clear by the effect of life circumstances (school, baby) is that we can't expect our plans to be static. You have to be ready to go with the flow and revise. Staying at a bed and breakfast with my husband would have been great... had he not had unsteady employment that left us without vacation time or money and had we not then had Nate, who would now cause more repair cost to our B&B stay than the actual night rate, probably. (Nate has a fondness for removing wallpaper from walls lately and wallpaper seems a de facto B&B thing.)

But this isn't to say I don't like where my life is now and that I lay around going, "But we NEVER got to GO to a B&B!" Okay, maybe I think it once in a while, but it doesn't negatively impact my outlook on life. I would give up a million B&Bs to have Nate instead.

So even though my goal here today is to tie up loose ends, I'm actually acknowledging that there will always be loose ends. I can't get everything tied up in the way that I used to when the only concern and affector in my life was myself. My whole way of moving through life has changed because life is an untied end, always.