Two quilters that I really admire are Bonnie, of Quiltville, and Judy of Patchwork Times. They are both dynamo quilters; I have no idea how they achieve so much in the same 24 hours that I get each day.  They are great role models for me; neither of them think 'Oh that's too hard, I won't bother, I haven't got enough time, it'll never work...'  They just get in and do stuff, and then they blog about it.  I want to be like them when I grow up.

One thing that Judy does is make lists and spreadsheets, and I've never been much of a list person.  If I make them, I lose them, or forget them until days later; I get distracted, tired, my life gets hijacked by some emergency.  Or when I sit down to make the list, everything flies right out of my head, and I'm staring at a blank page wondering what on earth needs to be done.  It's really pathetic.

Lately my life has been a shambles of one 'urgent' job after another.  I barely have time to package up one thing as done and dusted before I have to get right into the next one.  I hate having to work like that, it wears me out, and then I find it very hard to recover my momentum.  I'm not a dynamo person.  Not now.

The way I worked when I was younger was in big cycles of manic effort, weeks at a time of non-stop energy and enthusiasm, then even longer weeks of nothing much.  The manic part was great!  I got so much done.  In one 6-week manic phase I wrote my book on QAYG, and quilted all the quilts on my Janome, at the same time as running my family and household.  I probably got 5 hours sleep a night, but I felt wonderful.  There was a slow period after that, while I just pootled in my cottage garden and did the necessary chores around the house, but it was a recovery time after all that effort.

I'm quite a few years older now, and I can't muster that manic energy anymore.  I have to pace myself so I don't run out of energy entirely, and it's been hard learning to do that.  I prefer the boom and bust cycle, oddly enough.  But now life is more even, without the huge highs and, more importantly, without huge lows.  I'm grateful I'm still quilting and still enthusiastic about it all.

I run a pattern club for my digital designs that comes out each month, and I design between 20 and 30 patterns for that.  I also have a website for those digitised patterns that keeps me busy with orders and enquiries.  I help Mereth quilt the customer quilts that are problematic, or need complicated computerised quilting that she's not confident to tackle herself.  I fill wholesale orders for my printed patterns, and printed pantographs.  And what I haven't told the blog is that for the last 14 months Mereth and I have also done the mail run for our little town, which takes between 20 and 25 hours each out of our week.  Small wonder I have no time!  and maybe that's why I have no energy .......

I've done all this extra work to help pay for my shed, which I hope  is going to be the start of the next interesting period of my life.  Once it's up (next Wednesday they say they'll be here, fingers crossed) all sorts of options will be possible, and I don't even know which one will be the right one.  It's going to be exciting and tiring and exhilarating and exhausting all at once.  I really hope I have the energy to blog about it.

Which gets me back to the original premise of this long and rambling post; I need to learn how to make lists!   There has to be a way to keep all these balls and dinner plates and bowling pins juggling in the air over the next few months.  I'm sure Bonnie and Judy could do it, and so can I.