List of Things To Do

1. Take dinner, pie and full attention and daughterly devotion to parents' house tonight and comfort father who is having surgery tomorrow to remove early-stage (and hopefully benign) bladder cancer.

2. Sit with younger daughter and proctor her through the five Lang Arts practice tests she has missed in class over the last three days, thereby helping her to feel successful and relaxed about returning to school.

3. Sit with older daughter and supervise progress towards a long-ass brochure project about Missouri to include various hand-drawn pictures of state seal, bird, tree, and other arcana. (Did you know the show-me state has a state fish, state dinosaur, state horse, state amphibian, and state invertebrate among other things?)

4. Write brilliant and flattering review for friend who has book launching next week - and post in appropriate places. (Hmm - consider having text made into T-shirt for more publicity??)

5. Try not to brood over fact that kidney recipient is out-of-sorts with me as I have not yet offered up kidney in dramatically life-improving surgery for her, crap extremely painful and I can't drive for six weeks surgery for me.

6. Try not to brood over fact that I still have not lost the 30 pounds I want to lose before I feel comfortable undergoing surgery.

7. Continue food diary and restricting food intake. Try not to eat when stressed. HA!

8. Begin walking daughters to school daily. It's exactly one mile and by leaving 10 minutes earlier, they would get benefit of fresh-morning-air exercise and I can add two mile walk to my daily routine. Plus we can have more bonding.

9. Continue yoga as often as possible. Classes are great but I have to be careful not to go to classes instead of spending those precious, fleeting, daytime, alone hours working.

10. Bill clients for work completed in August, thus making payment ever so much more likely.

11. Check to be sure all household bills for September have been paid and all accounts are in good standing.

12. Egad! Prepare quarterly tax payment and put in mail ASAP! (Bye, money. It was nice knowing you.)

13. Arrange to have flowers delivered to elderly aunt whose birthday was on Tuesday.

14. Call other elderly aunt to see how her chemotherapy is going.

15. Call sister-in-law on birthday and express regrets and sympathy that she'll be spending the day at a funeral for a close friend. (At least, I ordered a gift and it should be delivered today!)

16. Put gifts for other friend in mail, as I missed lunch with her.

17. Reschedule tutoring of close friend from this evening to this weekend.

18. Drop off flowers, cake, card or at least call and congratulate other friend on her first week back at work.

19. Decide on day to collect urine for 24 hours straight. Then stay at home and do that (while also writing.)

20. Take urine to hospital the following day, wait for an hour to let them draw blood, wait for another bit to have appointment with transplant coordinator.

21. Take transplant coordinator the erroneous bill for one of the tests and have it taken out of my name.

22. Call my health insurance member services to find out if they will drop my coverage for donating my kidney. (Good to ask ahead of time.)

23. Write about 20 proposals and make about 20 phone calls to funders and send about 5 official emails to catch up with workload.

24. Email friend who is attempting to be novelist after unexpectedly losing his job this spring and failing to become a successful grant writer and tell him that his first chapters were more compelling than I found them to be.

25. Submit the stories that are collecting on my hard drive.

26. Research submission markets for those stories.

27. Write final project for class - due in 10 days. Try to finish promising story begun three years ago.

28. Work on Family Journal. Attempt to bring entries up to date and paste in photos/memorabilia collected in last three months. (I love the Family Journal, but I seem to be always one to two months behind.)

29. Spend all day tomorrow at hospital with mother and father, offering encouragement about surgery.

30. Book reservations for trip to see niece for first time, hopefully in October.

31. Maintain spiritual balance, compassion, sense of humor, and equanimity.

32. Breathe and enjoy.