Today is the third day of my month of staying away from the studio. I still check my email, get back to phone calls, and have a meeting here and there. But for the most part, I am taking this month to get my life back together. I’ve worked too hard for too long, and my home life desperately needs some attention.

Before I left for Georgia, this was the list I compiled of things I need to do:

Outdoors:
- Take pictures while I do all of the landscape work
- Contact city to get permission to dig for new landscaping
- Cut down unhealthy Mesquite, plant a young Chilean Mesquite tree and a Bougainvillea vine on the corner of my lot. Make a metal trellis and attach it to the wall. Add fresh decorative gravel.
- Add landscaping mounds and a dry creek bed in the front yard, plant a Texas Ebony tree.
- Finish backyard with a concrete curb, three different kinds of rock, a weed barrier, and two new plants.
- Plant a wall of six Oleander trees in the backyard
- Install and paint outdoor shutters on the front of the house
- Spray weed preventer on all gravel surfaces
- Install security lighting around house
- Install two new ceiling fans in the back porch.
- Touch up paint
- Train the yellow-flower vine out front
- Plant ground cover out front to replace the hibiscus
- Paint all gates

Indoors:
- Demolition the kitchen and dining room
- Design and install new kitchen cabinets, appliances (this is a big job)
- Pull up all flooring in non-bedroom rooms
- Install new lighting and flooring
- Refinish dining room table
- Get rid of fish tank
- Paint the garage, install cabinets and work bench
- Install French patio doors in the master bedroom
- Install new sink and cabinets in master bathroom, fix tile
- Recessed lighting in the hallway

Web:
- Finish designing and then launch the new nomoho.com
- Print five shirts, launch nomoho.com store
- Send out promotional emails to friends and family
- Find shipping solution
- Re-outfit the guest room to be a second office
- Make splash pages for all my sites that aren’t up: jp2hero.com, sayhitome.com, kustoms.com,
-Make simple, CSS-driven new version of this website, supafly.com.

Cars:
- Element: get new black rims, install a different alarm, design outside graphics, pay someone to do it
- Chevy: get it moving, licensed and insured, new exhaust, begin suspension work, put on nomoho.com decals, get a trailer

Random Personal:
- Get a new laptop battery
- Business transactions
- Set up auto bill-pay for all utilities
- Real estate transactions
- Pray a rosary each day

So I hope to get all of that done in the next month. I know it probably won’t happen, but I at least want to give it a chance.

On the way home from the airport in Phoenix, I stopped off to see Candyce at her college. It was only fifteen minutes, but it felt good to see her again. I haven’t seen her that much in the past two months, and it’s getting very difficult. She has a busy semester at school, and it is getting irritation. The last sixty days have been an endless chain of class, homework, work, homework, sleep, homework… I’ve never seen anyone go like this for so long.

I resent her professors because all they have to do is snap their fingers and she pours twenty hours into a project. I’m left on the outside of her life, trying to be a supportive boyfriend. This is just not a good time for me. But the 15-minute visit was awesome.

Feeling jealous of the time Candyce gives her school work, I decided not to drive straight home, but to drive to the nursery instead. If she was going to obsess over her homework, I could do the same. I needed to pickup some Oleander trees for my backyard. Oleanders are a flowery bush that is sometimes trained into being a tree. I have a total of six now, and they will make a screen so I don’t look at my neighbors anymore. I have lived in this house for three years now, and I’m tired of going into my backyard “sanctuary” just to make eye-contact with a woman washing her dishes. So my plan is to plant the three today.

This next month is going to be very good for me. I need to work with my hands in the backyard and not on a computer. I need to exercise and pray. I need to get my life back together.