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Hey y'all! It's nice to be back after taking a challenge away to focus on recovering from eye surgery. My eye is healing really well, and I'll have my final check in with the doc this month as well as an optometrist appointment for new glasses prescription. Yay! For this challenge I will be going through my bookcase. There are notebooks, drawing pads, art books, writing, pattern books, songbooks, a cookbook, language how to's, and a bunch of novels. Not to mention pens, pencils, stuffed buddies, and more... This bookcase has become representative of my to-do list, and it’s growing teeth.I bought most of these books when I decided I was going to accomplish a big goal and the books and more were tools to help me reach those goals, but instead it became overwhelming. Maybe instead of focusing on the result, I need to focus on the journey. 1. Read the books. 2. Do the assignments in the books. 3. Decide if the book is worth keeping. 4. Deliver unwanted books to donation centers. Do not put them back on the shelf! 5. Draw and write in the empty notebooks 6. Keep the drawings I love and put them in a binder together. Take the trash ones out and recycle them. 7. Do not purchase anymore books, notebooks, drawing pads, supplies, etc. That's a procrastination tactic. 8. Record and reflect on my progress here. 9. Remember this is not a shame exercise. This is a fun practice to remind me that time and effort spent just for me is worthwhile. So we'll see what the bookcase looks like at the end of the challenge. What will stay? What will be gone? I can tell you that the Raggedy Anns on the top of the case are staying. (but they may need a good dusting ) Supporting this goal, I've set a limit to social media on my phone for 30 minutes a day. That gives me enough time to keep up with my friends and family, but also not so much time that I'm wondering where my free time went. I'm also going to continue following the "Put things away instead of putting them down." I save a lot of time not having to pick up piles of stuff. Cleaning is so much faster because I can just just start dusting right away, and I have less laundry to do. And I feel like I can focus better on what I'm doing because I'm not surrounded by a mess. Which reminds me, Bing Bong needs to go on the bed, not the keyboard. LOL

Hey, all-- I'm planning to do NaNoWriMo this year and wondering if any other Rebels are going to as well. I'm pretty intimidated by it and am planning to make it part of my next challenge--thought maybe we could all form a little guild and encourage each other. For those who are not familiar: NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month, when a bunch of people all try to write a novel in one month. www.nanowrimo.org.