Hey y’all. Guess what I finished today?

You’ll never guess so I’ll show you:

Did you think I couldn’t do it? So did I.

Here is the list of goals I set for myself for April 2012:

1. Write 750 words every day for the entire month.
2. Eat no sweets.
3. Drink no pop.
4. Exercise at least 5 days a week for 30 minutes a day.
5. Lose 2 pounds a week.

Here is the list of goals I actually accomplished for April 2012:

1. Eat no sweets.
2. Exercise 5 days a week for at least 30 minutes a day.
3. Write 750 words a day.

Some might call that a two-fifths failure. I call it a three-fifths success (four-fifths if you consider that I’m finally blogging about something again).

Every month I am getting a little further ahead in life, and even if I don’t accomplish EVERYthing I set out to accomplish in a month, I’m at least building on my goals and I feel like nothing is impossible as long as I can set small, achievable milestones for myself.

I kind of love everything about it.

That was going to be all I posted today but because my cousin Calli told me on Saturday that she wished I would post every day I got a very big head indeed and thought that maybe you’d like reading this deep thought I had the other day while mowing the lawn after work…

Enjoy. (Or don’t. [Screw you, haters, I hate you more.])

••••••••••••••••

Do you ever look back on your life and try to pinpoint the exact moment that changed everything? The single decision you made, or the single decision that was made for you, which got you to this point today?

I do. Sometimes I do that.

How did I end up here, in Canada, mowing a boulevard of grass with an old-school motorless reel lawnmower in the rain like a hippie, with a husband and a house and a paid-for car, with a job and piano students and actual friends (I’m pretty sure they’re actual friends) in a country not my own, with cookbooks and a stove and the physical, mental, and economic resources to make my own dinners, with a bachelor’s degree in English, with tomato plants sprouting on a table by my back deck? How did I get to where I have a back deck?

Maybe I never would’ve ended up in Canada maneuvering an old-school motorless push-reel lawnmower around three overgrown-and-growing poplar tree trunks on a grassy boulevard in the rain like a hippie if I hadn’t decided to move here for one semester of community college when I was 19 (for an adventure). Or maybe if I hadn’t visited this region seven years ago on a summer road trip with my mom.

Maybe I never would’ve taken that trip with my mom if I hadn’t been dating Leroy Pants during the summer of 2005 and she hadn’t thought he was going to try to marry me and she hadn’t tried everything in her power to get me away from him.

And how was it that I came to be dating LP anyway? Maybe I never would’ve done that if I hadn’t seen him at a church social one night. Maybe if I had stayed home and watched You’ve Got Mail for the three-hundredth time instead of going to that church social, then I never would’ve met him and agreed to go on one-or-fifty dates with him and scared my mom so bad she’d feel the need to see me out of the country just to keep me safe.

What if I hadn’t conditioned myself to love Canada ever since I watched Anne of Green Gables with my sister and my Grandma every summer, thus giving me a long-borne desire to visit Canada?

And why did we watch Anne of Green Gables? Maybe we never would’ve watched it if my Grandma hadn’t picked up the VHS at a yard sale for a quarter when I was 10.

Am I here mowing my lawn like a hippie because my grandma had a weakness for a bargain?

Maybe she never would’ve liked bargains if her father hadn’t been a farmer during the Depression. And maybe he wouldn’t have been a farmer during the Depression if he had read different books as a kid, looked up to different heroes, dreamed different dreams.

And maybe he would have read different books as a kid if the terrible neighbor children hadn’t checked all of the good ones out of the library and fed them to their chickens.

It goes on and on, and I get lost in the mind-numbing cosmic haze of it all if I’m not careful.

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