Good morning Crickets. Welcome to day number fifty-nine of Operation Achieve Anything which also happens to be the first of my non-birthday birthday options as a leap year child. I opt to celebrate my special day on the last of the month of February because I feel more of a connection to the shortened quirky month than I do to the boring month of March. That said, I do fully understand those who disagree since my actual birthday is technically the day after February 28th.

Today I plan to tidy up my room in an effort to bring an end to the reflective funk that I’ve been leading up to the day of my age change which is kind of a tradition of mine. As I’ve said in the past couple of post, though I hate how this annual reflective period leads to a drop in productivity, I let it ride out on my birthday and New Years since these yearly checkpoints bring on more inspirational reminiscences than regretful recollections of the drama that leads to flat-out depression.

Now that I’m back to my pre-Winter Olympics sleep schedule, I can’t wait to get to a post-birthday mindset to start working on the projects that all of this reflecting inspired. Or at least get back to the other tasks that I’ve already started with a newly refreshed and inspired frame of mind. I can already feel it in my eyes that my birthday-blues are almost over since they no longer feel heavy from constantly wanting to sleep.

Alright, enough with the birthday talk, let’s move on to talk about these assignments where once again, both lessons have understandable messages that make sense but as far as providing inspirational tasks to write about, I’m not feeling much for either. Yesterday’s assignment was another repeat of the message to genuinely take interest in people while being nice and helpful without expecting anything in return.

As a work-from-home shut-in, I mainly only see the same four people every day. These people are all family with one of them being a small child. We all live in the same house, with me out in the detached garage, and we all get along minus the standard family/roommate brand of bickering that will come up from time to time. Last night, I simply was myself while hanging out which I guess technically fulfills the assignment of continuing to treat others well without expecting anything in return.

Today’s assignment is a little more interesting but it’s still a bit of a repeat of an early assignment that focused on being more observant. For the task at hand today, I’m supposed to stop and smell the roses, or as the book like to use based on the quote up above, stop and notice the purple. I believe that the last lesson in observation skills was more about being aware of your surroundings where this assignment is more about enjoying every aspect of the object of observation.

For example, don’t just eat a meal. Instead, take the time to take in the visual aspects of the presentation, smell the combination of ingredients, taste each bite, notice the various textures, while enjoying whatever sounds may come from the meal or that may be playing in the background to provide some atmosphere.

As always, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow's update to see what I manage to come up with in order to complete today’s assignment. So, until then, it’s now time for me to wrap this up with my usual sign off by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

 Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.