Tales of the Derry Plague by Anselmo, Ray (most inspirational books of all time TXT) 📗

the previous day over breakfast before starting the new day in earnest. Better than doing it in the evening, when she was likelier to be tired and put it off.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, bath, meds, journal – what else? She looked around, and realized she hadn’t washed dishes since the power went out. She needed to do that today before the stuff caked on them became new lifeforms. She started another column, for weekly activities, and put dishwashing, laundry and “movie night?” on it. She could haul the dishes down to the ocean today, and maybe make each subsequent Tuesday “dish day” or something.

But what could she add to the daily list? Hmmm … she pulled out the Possible long-term activities sheet and looked it over. A lot of it was one-time projects (like the outhouse) or stuff it was too early for (like harvesting the farm’s crops), but she could begin to chip away at the rest. The house-to-house search was one to work on, especially since she’d drawn that map yesterday – that would make it easier to check each place off as she went.

She added Search min. 2 residences to the daily list. Counting each apartment separately and leaving aside the horse ranch and Holy Green, there were about a hundred dwellings in Sayler Beach. Two a day meant she’d have the whole town canvassed by the middle of October, before the rainy season began in earnest. That should do – at that point, she’d have a rough idea of where she could find anything she needed. If it was in town.

That “if” led her back down the long-term list, to Explore E. Marin (after semi moved – drive there). Well, the semi was moved – there was nothing to stop her except availability of fuel and time. She put Explore E. Marin on the weekly list, then added Siphon min. 5 gal. gas to the daily list. That would fill forty-five minutes to an hour a day and keep her supply up, provided she could find enough jerricans or plastic jugs to put the gas in. She’d have to start searching for those specifically – she’d used almost all the ones in the store …

Now she needed a list for today, and started it with Look for gasoline containers and Wash the dishes. She took a deep breath and looked at all the papers in front of her – a to-do-list for today, one for every day, one weekly, one long-term … she was about two steps away from pinning them to the wall and stringing yarn between them with pushpins, like a conspiracy theorist trying to figure out who shot JFK. “Yeah, this is chaos. Pick one and get it together.”

She chose the daily schedule and a new sheet of paper. It didn’t need to be inflexible – she wasn’t bringing stone tablets down from Sinai. But it would be good to have it as a safety net, to fall back on when options threatened to overwhelm her. She could put it up on the otherwise useless refrigerator with a magnet, a guide to sort her days and keep her sanity on track. It took a few attempts before she had something she liked:

Daily schedule:

Dress

Breakfast / journal

AM – Siphon gas, min. 5 gallons

AM – Harvest Holy Green (beginning c. 9/15) – 1-2 hours/day

Lunch

Aft. – Search min. 2 dwellings, general catalogue of items

Dinner

PM – Bathe / other washing

PM – Lithium

It wasn’t full, wasn’t comprehensive, and wasn’t law, but it covered enough to serve and not so much that she’d feel pressured. There was plenty of rattle room to put in anything else that might need doing. Just right. She set it aside, looked at the weekly items and started sorting that out:

Weekly schedule:

Monday –

Tuesday – dishwashing (PM)

Wednesday – laundry (PM)

Thursday –

Friday – movie night? (Find equipment, see about power)

Saturday – explore E. Marin County (all day)

Sunday – REST DAY, prepare for next week

Organized but flexible, just what she needed. It felt good to have it on paper in front of her, to look at it and see Things She Could Do and when to do them. To not have to think too hard about it, to free her mind for other work. To take the pressure off. Other people might find it intimidating or restricting, but it suited her.

And to prepare for it all:

To do today – day 23:

Journal (cover day 22)

Store – water, canned/powdered milk, other?

AM – Siphon gas, min. 5 gallons

Find jerricans (check Wally Sandborn’s, fire dept., ranch)

Find spray paint to mark cars siphoned, houses checked

Think about rain barrels

Search houses? (Or start Wed.?)

Dinner

PM – Bathe / wash dishes

PM – Lithium

Wow, that was kind of a lot. But it was mostly small items – other than house checking and maybe finding gas containers, none were likely to take more than an hour. One just involved thinking. It would let her ease into the proposed daily routine. It would get a lot ready for later in the week or month or next month. And it would keep the dust off her without tiring her out. “I see this as an absolute win,” she quoted and grinned.

To start it off, she got the journal out of her room, musing as she did about how she hadn’t moved to the master bedroom. But earlier it would have felt creepy, and now she just didn’t see the point – the extra space would be of no use to her. She sat at the dining table and wrote out the Adventure of the Toppling McDonald’s Truck, then added her plans for today because why not?

She left the book there, but cleaned up the rest of the papers, throwing away the ones she’d recopied or no longer needed and putting