Making a List and Checking It Twice

A quick holiday post here as Vera and I have plans today involving family, gift-giving, and turkey. In other words, it’s the usual, although this being the first Christmas on the farm we’re not going to stray too far away from our little red barn and four-legged friends who live there.

Am looking at a whole week coming up here where I’m largely free from my usual work assignments. Almost unsure how to handle such freedom from deadlines and obligations, although something tells me I’ll find ways to fill the time here on the farm, including finishing putting up that fence I mentioned yesterday.

The calendar is making me think back to previous years when I’d spend these last days of December doing a lot of final tabulating of my previous 12 months’ performance playing poker online. The whole year I would spend making a long list of how each session had gone, then these final days would be taken up with checking back over it.

I know I would often put more meaning into that final total for the year than I really should have, dividing it by day, week, and month, examining all the different trends and patterns, and subsequently using it as something against which to measure the coming year. Pros know that December 31 is an arbitrary cutoff point, but it’s hard for most of us to resist the year-over-year measuring of one’s poker progress.

Heck, it’s hard not to do similar self-evaluation about other things, too, when that last week of the year arrives. I guess having some time off allows our minds to wander in that direction a little more freely.

Today, though, I’m not going to worry too much about how things added up this year. The only counting I’ll be doing will be to keep track of how many horse cookies are left.