Austin, TEXAS, January 2, 2006— My word for 2006 is focus.

That is too funny! Me? Focus?

At one point today I was thinking I bought some stuff on ebay (some decorations for the February party and a birthday present for my nephew's February birthday) but I hadn't heard a peep from the sellers. But when I flipped over to the browser to check I got distracted by the page already in the browser which was a friend's WEB page.

After I'd surfed around looking at her new version of her page and reading about what was going on with a book she had in the works, I wondered "why am I here?"

I didn't remember my ebay quesiont. This is how my days go. Moving from distraction to distraction. From interruptions by someone else to interruptions from inside my head.

When I got home from the gym today I saw the bookkeeper's car in the drive. I went up to have a chat (and distract her from tax forms for the little business that chugs along with the things FFP still does). FFP was out interviewing for his column and I sat in his chair. I saw an answering machine there that he used to punch on to answer his second line if he couldn't put the first on hold. We cancelled the second line, figuring that after all these years people calling our main number (and the business's number) could get a busy signal instead of rolling over to another line. FFP was always there for all the clients. That's why he resigned most of them last May. When you are in business for yourself, you can't retire. You resign clients and don't take new ones. Similarly, you could never get fired although lots of clients can fire you. And do. FFP was most famously fired by a computer company based in Austin with a four-letter eponymous name. Anyway, this little sub twenty buck answering machine was sitting there (still with me? I'm distracting you now), nothing to answer since we have a service on the remaining line. I have a line in my office that is separate. I'd had a secondhand answering machine on it that died in a power surge. While most people who call it could just call my cell phone and leave a message, I thought I'd try to hook this one up.

I took it downstairs. It had a battery, but I later realized it had an adaptor, too. Must have been unplugged from it. Before that I'd had to try several ways to hook up the thing to the phone line. I went back up later, got the adaptor. But it didn't seem to make a good connection. I went so far as to take it apart and see that a plastic surround on the connector was broken.

"This," I thought, "Is how I waste my time!" To my credit, I dumped everything...answering machine, adaptor, instructions in the trash can. This is how stuff piles up around me! Stop it.

That is how my days go. Off to do something, distracted by something else. I admit to having spent a group of concentrated minutes in front of the computer trying to craft yesterday's entry (yeah, and it wasn't much). And I spent two hours driving to the gym, doing my workout, driving home.

But the rest of the day was fluffed away. I stripped the bed and laundered the sheets and made the bed back up. I ate. I answered e-mail.

At one point I decided I was going to work the crossword in The New York Times but my phone (the one with no answering machine) rang and FFP said he was emailing me a column to proofread. That task sent me to the WEB to try to verify the spelling of someone's name.

At another point, it suddenly popped into my head that I hadn't tried some software that I'd installed a new version of. So I did that.

I was certain at one point that I was going to take down all the Christmas decorations and put them away. I almost brought the boxes from storage at one point but I had my hands full. I decided to snap a few photos before I did it. (See below.) That is as far as I got. Except, of course, I got the photos unloaded from the camera. Somewhere in there I downloaded one for FFP for his column, too.

I figured after I got the decorations down (which I never got done) that I'd work on the planning for the party in February. That never got started either, of course.

At one point the distraction was a phone call from a friend. She was talking about going out. I'd been harboring a hope to go to Cedar Street because the weather was so temperate and hear a friend perform at Happy Hour. I asked FFP if he'd like to go. He said yes so I had to give up doing whatever useful thing I'd thought of doing and take a shower. Then, of course, I was clean and time was short before we'd leave so what was there to do but, you guessed it, work the crossword in The Times!

Coming back from downtown where I drank a couple of glasses of wine and ate too much (snacks we got at take-out at Malaga and dinner at Taverna) all my tasks seemed better left for tomorrow. I parked myself in the bedroom with my book.

Why are my days simply moving from distraction to distraction with a bunch of "where was I?" Why can't I focus and plan?