Calendar bottlenecks

The Knitternall family has officially entered the insanely busy season of end-of-year wrap-ups. The calendar is an overly full, overlapping mess. I ask myself every year, "Why are you doing this to yourself?"

Evidently, I don't learn from experience!

A headline in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution caught my attention: "Worst commuting bottlenecks?" In addition to any road around Georgia Perimeter College and Perimeter Mall, I'd have to suggest every road in Dunwoody when the garbage guys are doing their weave back-and-forth through both sides of our two-lane roads. You just have to putt-putt behind them because the driver dodges happily into oncoming traffic. (I understand why - he's covering his crew. But it's darned frustrating.) Twice a week, I get stuck behind them during the long trek from the middle school back to Dunwoody Nature Center. Chamblee-Dunwoody Road has to be the straightest, pokiest road in town. Except when people are flying 50 miles an hour down it and lean on their horns because you're driving 35. (The legal speed limit.)

ANYWAY.

The reason that headline poked me in the stream-of-consciousness is that there are bottlenecks in the calendar, too. The worst calendar bottlenecks in the Knitternall biosphere are

• the first two weeks of school, when all the things I volunteered to do somehow, magically, end up happening at the same time.
• PTO and Scout meetings scheduled on the same night. Every month.
• the perfect storm of April and May + sports teams + end of school meetings + drama productions in April and May + prom + SATs and AP Tests + . . .
• Christmas - church celebrations + parties + semester finals + getting gifts for family and friends + son's birthday + travels back home to North Carolina.
• This week, as I prep for an end-of-year meeting (with special presentations to much-valued volunteers), get a major project underway at the Nature Center, finalize the Charter revision and send it to the County Schools for their blessing before it heads back to the State Department of Education, monitor a few ongoing family projects, and the first of many, many fundraisers for Odyssey of the Mind to the calendar.

Unfortunately, there's no calendar construction project available to fix these bottlenecks. There's just me. The real culprit.

Maybe I need to learn from one of my friends. She has a two-item-per-day rule for her calendar.  And both items must be separated by at least two hours.

Would that work?

Nah.