edge of the continent

I’m in Palm Springs for the next few days to hang out with my sister, her husband and kids, and our parents in what has become our informal, annual get-together. While my brother-in-law attends to some work-related stuff, the rest of us entertain the little ones and venture bravely crazily out into the heat.

The heat. Wow. The average temperature in Palm Springs in August is 107 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s oven-like and sinks right through your skin, down into your bones. It feels good compared to the humidity I have been suffering through for weeks back home, but quickly becomes oppressive with any extended outdoor activity. Like the thirty-second walk from my car to my hotel room.

Speaking of my room: while I should be frolicking with my family right about now, I am instead holed up in here with a bad back. Neither trauma nor any poor-form lifting went into the mess that is my lumbar region; I was tossing socks into my bag this morning when a mild discomfort first bloomed across my lower back. Everything I’ve done since then has been punctuated with whimper-inducing spasms that leave me embarrassed for how un-stoic my reaction has been to them.

My family has been great: they’ve offered plenty of perfectly legal painkillers and massages and stories of our growing collective creakiness, and kindly picked up a heating pad with soothing vibration action for me. We all had a laugh when I literally couldn’t get up off the floor where I thought I might feel better. But this — being here in my room, back being vibrated, slurping a root beer float by myself — kind of sucks. I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll wake up feeling magically restored, but I’m not picky: I’ll settle for “upright”.

Okay, it’s nearly 2am and I am still awake. My half-baked strategy of “putting it out into the universe” that I need to get to sleep earlier and “seeing what happens” has not succeeded as wildly as one would have imagined it to. It’s time to buckle down and break out the tools: I’m grabbing my pens and a straightedge to draw a little chart to track my progress, partly to give me a visual on my efforts and mostly because I still get an odd nerdy-girl satisfaction from sketching out grid patterns on small pieces of paper. The chart will be tucked away neatly into the pocket notebook that I use to write down stuff that I would otherwise forget.

Such as “go to bed earlier,” apparently.

I haven’t found the link yet, but sometime in the past year I read a blog post where the author had suggested starting one new goal every month rather than attempting them all at one time. If I recall the gist of it — or at least how I have put it into practice — it was a way to tackle a laundry list of goals and move away from the all-or-nothing, set-up-to-fail scenario that often occurs when we take on the overwhelming task of creating a whole slew of new habits at one time (the writer was specifically thinking of all those doomed New Year’s resolution lists). So instead, you focus on one habit to change or one goal to reach for thirty days, with the idea that it will become a regular part of your routine by the end of the month. By then, you’re ready to start the next goal to focus on. If done well, you’ll have created twelve new habits and/or reached twelve new goals by the end of the year.

All of this to say, this is not the goal I thought I would tackle this month but it’s certainly as good as any. Bring on the grid!

Update: After recalling that I had read the post referenced above via a link from Lifehacker, I immediately found what I was thinking of: 12 Habits in 2006 from John Richardson’s site, Success Begins Today.

There was such a wide gap between the grandmother I knew in my early childhood and the woman that I realized — too late — I would never truly get to know as an adult. There lingers still a sadness for all that was lost and all that could have been had she not passed away as she did: slowly, away from us, not always able to remember. Sometimes when I think of her I am reminded of her funeral… but not of the sorrow, which has since passed; instead, I am taken back to the celebration of her life and how it was very much a reunion for her family and a rediscovery of all that binds us together. And interspersed with the bittersweet wonder of reconnecting with everyone are images from that week in St. Paul: brilliant snow draped across a frozen space, and tree limbs stretched to the heavens, the groves of supplicants naked in the snow.

My grandmother made a wonderful potato soup, loved to sing, and was a die-hard baseball fan all her life. She raised four children on her own after the early death of her husband, worked hard, persevered, and took great comfort in her faith. My dad looks just like his mom, and I look just like him.

Today would have been her eighty-fourth birthday, and I’d like to think that if she were still alive and healthy she would have celebrated it tonight by watching her beloved Dodgers beat the Reds and enjoying her favorite beer. Even this Twins fan would have rooted for them, just for her.

So far this week, I haven’t been very successful at reaching my “early to bed” goal. 3:30, 12:30, 11:30, 1:30… it’s 12:00 now and I still have a few things I’d like to finish before hitting the sack.

(At least I’m using a hairdryer, rather than my car window, to dry and style my hair in the morning again.)