Standards and Practices

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No, this isn’t really about the NBC department that set the tone for the original Star Trek.  It’s more about what we ask of ourselves.  Sometimes we push hard and reach for the stars.  I’d like to think I always do that, but I know I sometimes don’t.  Like with dusting.  I admit it to taking shortcuts.  Proper dusting of a bookshelf requires taking the books down and dusting them as well as the shelf.  I’m so not there!  I’m lucky if I run the vacuum, with that skinny little attachment, over the tops of the books every blue moon or so.  Otherwise, I dust the front of the shelf, give the spines a lick and a promise and call it done.

Then there’s ironing. What ever happened to “permanent press?” So many garments require “light touch-up with an iron.” No matter how the vendors dress it up, that means hauling out the ironing board, messing with the iron, and finding space to hang things until we finish. Most of us don’t exactly have a cadre of magic helpers to do these things. So the to-be-ironed pile sometimes dwarfs the TBR pile. Well, occasionally. The TBR pile is now approaching mountain status. Which reminds me of that wonderful movie, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain, but that’s a subject for a different blog. Ironing’s one thing that has to be done right if I’m going to do it.

So is revising. If I’m really rockin’ on a draft, blitzing along with everything flowing and that wonderful, creative high buzzing in my brain, I’ll leave things in that I know are inconsistent with other things, mentally marking the inconsistency for later resolution. When I go back through, I’ll decide which way I like better. When I start to revise, though, I become a detail fiend.   “Control freak” might be a better term for it.

What about you?  Which things do you really home in on, and which do you let slide?

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