I'm down to the wire on a few things.

Meetup with the Tax Dude tomorrow, and while I love him, really, you couldn't ask for a more delightful and literate Tax Dude, either I'm prepared or both of our time is wasted. Which means that today is all about the prep.
SXSW in one week. Speaking of prep...one week! How did it happen? I have the last installment in the how-to-prep series going up tomorrow, and still woefully behind on my own prep.
Ticking clock on some upstate prep. My hillbilly-Jewish cousin has relocated to NorCal, and, in a sort of mini-reprise of last fall's adventure, is giving me access to the pad while she goes to China to train in some high-level permutation of a martial art I lack a pedestrian grasp of.
Another ticking clock on a New York trip. I got asked to visit my alma mater for a shindig, an entrepreneurial weekend that's getting me back to the East Coast for the first time in almost 6 years, and back to my alma mater for the first time in (gulp) 25.

Clocks tick with more urgency than they did in my 20s, 30s and early 40s. I try to relax, knowing I'll never do everything, knowing that it's most important to do the Right Things, the things that feed me, both literally and figuratively (and really, more the latter), but it's hard. I want to wring as much as I can from the life that's left me, and I want to leave behind as much as I can that will be of use to those still here after I've left the planet.

It's a lot, I tell ya.

Earlier this week, I had a renegotiation talk with my own adviser. Our president may not have been in office long enough to have given a State of the Union address (and really, as so many have said, aren't we all acutely aware of its state, anyway?), but I have been at the helm of this particular ship for nigh on 48 years, and I'm here to say that for all my good intentions it would do, that dog won't hunt; I need to rescale, rejigger, realign where I want to go with the realities of where I'm at. The contracts I made with myself in late Q4'08 are going to be reevaluated at the end of Q1'09, and that's all there is to it. Either that, or I will likely end up a sad, small statistic.

Am I being overly brief or under-ly descriptive? Possibly.

But hey, it's crunch time, I need to work with the time I'm given. I gave the best of my love to my newsletter yesterday; if you haven't already, you can sign up here and soak in the insight that luxurious time and daylight provide. Really, it's a good one. You'll enjoy it.

And whether you do or not, any words of encouragement are welcome in this, my darkest hour of making things balance in Quicken.

I'm so not a numbers kinda gal...

xxx
c

Image by laffy4k via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.