When my routine gets shifted, it throws my whole day off. Even when it really shouldn’t. And it’s not like everything fell apart, I just started my morning routine a little later than usual and got to studying later than I planned. That’s it. Objectively? Not a crisis. Internally? It feels like the Earth’s axis has tilted five degrees.
I’m such a creature of habit. The predictability gives my day a rhythm. It’s funny how the smallest changes can feel so disruptive.
But here’s the part I’m trying to notice: I’ve still been studying for the past couple of hours. The day didn’t collapse. I didn’t give up. I adjusted. Maybe not gracefully, but I did it. And that counts for something.
I really want to put together a structured curriculum for my studying, something with phases, milestones, and possibly even monthly focuses. I think having a clear roadmap would help me feel grounded, especially on days when my timing gets off. It would make the progress more visible. Currently, I’m learning a great deal, but sometimes it feels abstract because I don’t have a clear framework to measure it against.
I just haven’t had the time to sit down and build that structure yet. Which is ironic, because creating structure is exactly what would calm me down.
During my lunch break, I accidentally time-traveled.
I fell straight down the rabbit hole that is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and looked up Karissaonline.com, one of my very first websites. I had a few back then, but the others were mostly fan sites. Karissaonline was different. It started out all about Karissa, and later it grew to include both her and Alexis. It felt like opening a digital scrapbook I didn’t know was still sitting on a shelf somewhere.
Then I looked up the early version of my current site, Desertkitten.com. Fun fact: Tommy came up with that name. It was a mashup of my first name and the fact that I was living in the desert when I started it.
It’s wild how much a website can change over the years. The design, the tone, the photos, the person behind the keyboard. It’s like watching layers of yourself evolve in real time, except preserved in slightly awkward fonts and very enthusiastic formatting choices. Part of me wants to change the layout again on my site. Oh, that will be a future me project. I just changed the layout of my site. It’s alright. I think it could be better.
I have the pics of the sites below. You can click on them to make them bigger.
I need to take care of a few things, put the clothes away, have the girls set up their airline accounts, and get dinner started.
