Not to say that I'm an old dog, but...

It was quite a week in the woods of Maine. I'll admit up front that I saw no moose other than the ones stitched into my favorite flip flops (indeed, the dead porcupine we saw by the side of the highway on the drive home doubled my total wildlife encounters for the week) but the adventures of THAT DOG more than made up for it.

You see, after twelve and a half years of absolute refusal to have anything to do with the water, THAT DOG learned to swim! Or, to put it more precisely, to boogie-board. I'm not entirely sure how it happened. One minute, I was bobbing along happily in the lake in my noodle chair, THAT DOG crying pitiously from the shore like always. The next thing I know, she's scrambled onto my niece's boogie board, and is being pulled through the waves to me by my sister. It was hysterical. I pulled her off into my arms, and she wiggled furiously and swam back to shore. But she swam! Like an Olympian! It was truly a sight to behold. The lesson of this vacation: you CAN teach an old dog new tricks :)

Which is good to know, given that I'm trying to mix things up a bit now that I'm back at home. A week with no TV, internet, or phone made me realize how much time I "fill" with little things--checking my email for the 97th time, running a Google search for the names of the all the Backstreet Boys, watching snippets of reruns of The Biggest Loser to see if it will push me out the door to the gym (it hasn't yet, and some of the food segments make me hungry)... You know, mindless time-fillers between one thing I have to do and another.

Now, I may never get to the place where I'm "mindful" every moment (perhaps because that word gets tossed around so much that it's become annoying). But being less mindless than I was before seems like a worthy goal.

So today, I instituted a new approach to time management: No internet until 3pm. No looking up the name of an author on Amazon, or checking the NYTimes Magazine for my friend's article. No pulling up the track titles for the CD I downloaded, or checking to make sure there wasn't an email emergency circling my in-box waiting for me to save the day.

My choices today, before 3pm, were good ones: writing, which I love (and which is, technically, my job and therefore what I should be doing with my daytime hours) and reading, which compliments the whole writing thing well when I give it space to do so. I'm finally at the stage of life I dreamed about in Algebra class, where I can focus on these two things and leave arithmetic out entirely. In it's own way, it made for the perfect day.

And yet... it was WAY harder than I expected. I'm astonished by how much my little dashes to the computer (which usually take at least a half-hour once I'm hooked in) are programmed into my psyche. It took everything I had not to invent some excuse to sign on, but somehow I didn't. And I had my most productive writing day in weeks.

Today's message? Here's to dogs on boogie boards inspiring us to try new things!

How was your week? What did I miss?