Hello, and welcome to the monthly check-in I tend to do on this website. While I would love for this place to operate as a forward-facing internet journal of sorts, kind of like how I used to use Instagram to catalogue interesting (or at least things and places I found interesting) when I was driving all over Phoenix as a freelancer, time is not always on my side.

In fact, time is so not always on my side I fear it’s operating against me, plotting my downfall, drawing maps on chalkboards it can quickly flip over to regular schoolwork to hide its evil tendencies, and doing a darn good job at it.

Seriously, A+, 4/4, 5-Star work from it.

Time is not in great abundance in my day to day life.

I’ve written before on here about my writing time, and how I really only have three possible sections of my day to do any kind of serious writing: in the morning, before the twins wake up; their nap time, in the middle of the day, for however long that is; at night, after the boys go to sleep, whenever they do go to sleep.

As you can see, my writing time is dependent on my children being asleep. Jeff Lemire once wrote about how he sometimes gets writing time done when is son has LEGO time. My boys aren’t at that age yet where they can play, not only by themselves, but without destroying everything. Papa has to be present otherwise Papa has to clean up the mess.

My mental state of the day is dependent on waking up before the boys. Call it a hangover from my classroom days, when I would show up two hours before the school bell rang to get work done, organize, lesson plan ahead, whatever. If I don’t get up before the boys, or if the boys wake up ten minutes after me, then my day is gone. Ruined. Messed up. I have to be awake long before them.

I wish I were strong enough to overcome these hurdles. I’m not, at present writing. Maybe one day I will be. But not today. And not this week.

I’ve been waking up at 5:30a every assigned work day for the last two weeks and its been great. I hope to keep this up for a while longer.

Hope you’re doing well.

Thanks for reading,

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Contact: robertmichaelacosta@gmail.com