365 Nights Read Online Free Page B

no lunches to pack, no clothes to launder, no meetings to staff, and no conference reports to write. Instead there was golf, massages, long walks, longer dinners, great wine, reading the newspaper, doing a puzzle, and the chance to sleep in (but who can actually sleep in anymore, right?). Even on the drive home from vacation, you can still bask in the glow of a great time together (until your kids get carsick driving down the mountain). But the memories remain. And in our case, the memories of our summer vacation in Asheville remained, too.
    However, when our big SUV rolled back into our driveway, the sweet vacation was over. It’s amazing how quickly the thrill of vacation is stripped away by forty-three messages in your e-mail box, thirteen more on your voice mail, a spastic cat who is mad that you left and madder that you came home, pounds of mail piled on your counter and sliding onto the floor, some dead plants, and a slightly weird house odor (I know you’ve had one, too, don’t deny it).
    It was crunch time—I had to figure out how to live the chaos of everyday life and how to keep my promise to my husband.
    So I started at the most logical point—my to-do list. Like everyone juggling marriage, kids, a husband, a semigreat career, a house, church commitments, preschool events, and the occasional girls’ night out, my hand cramped before I could even finish writing the list. My to-do list is a work of art, by the way. It is created by hand each week and has three key areas: a day-by -day list; a list of things I need to get done on any one of those days; and a work section that lists all my business commitments. I cross-reference my Kinko’s photo calendar with my weekly to-do list to ensure I’ve not missed anything, and both tools accompany me almost everywhere. As a result, I’ve got a day-at-a -glance, a week-at-a-glance, and a month-at-a-glance. (I thought about a minute-at-a-glance, but I know when to say when.)
    Despite all this preparation for my life, you’d be amazed at how much I still miss and don’t get to. And don’t pooh-pooh me, and say, well, if you had a BlackBerry or an iPhone or a Palm Pilot, you’d get it all done, and have constant pinging reminders. First, I’m just not that kind of girl. I need a broad visual landscape to see what I have going on, and a tiny little screen with those little thumbing motions just isn’t for me. There is something therapeutic in writing it all down. And second, you high-tech planners miss about as much as I do anyway.
    Brad’s schedule, as the head of marketing for a large manufacturer, is pretty consistent. He leaves early, and unless there is some nutty emergency at work, or a sales dinner, he is home for dinner with me and the kids at 6 P.M. every night. So our opportunities for sex are: morning, before he leaves for work and before the kids wake up; or evening, after the kids fall asleep; and on the weekends, when schedules miraculously mesh and both kids are at a playdate and/or birthday party and we can hunker down in the house . . . all alone. Since I am not a morning person, and our kids are up and about getting ready for school, I was pretty much certain that this was going to leave our nightly hours to making whoopee.
    This all meant that I had to get organized. Brad and I didn’t always agree on how to manage a house—we still don’t. But we both agree that neither of us was very good at it at first (and my mother would contend that we still aren’t). Negotiating household priorities and chores was hard, as are all things that symbolize power and control. There are a few things he does—occasionally mow, take out the garbage and recyclables, pay the bills, service the cars; and a lot of things I do—cook, make the beds, do the laundry, water the plants; and things on which we tag team—unload the dishwasher, get the kids to bed, tidy up, and so on. Getting to a