How to make September go by so fast........

......your neck will hurt for at least a week from trying to catch a glimpse of the school flavored month as it whizzed by your head.

Calendars are to avoided at all costs, it's the only way to truly make time pass at alarming speeds. It's the same principal as not staring at the clock so that it appears the hand jumped from 10 to 3 and oh boy it's snack time again! Only this is more fun because whole weeks will dissolve in a blur, punctuated by annoying things like dentist appointments and season premieres.

If you can flip your schedule so that you get up at 4 in the afternoon for a few weeks straight, great! You're on the right track. I always say if it's good enough for the Alaskans it's good enough for me. (Days without sunshine..and salmon**.)

It's funny too how much time will pass whilst you're busy elsewhere wrestling with the aforementioned schedule. Nothing spells fun like scheduling a 10 am dentist appointment when you've been currently going to bed around the vicinity of 7 am. We take great satisfaction in doing the math a week ahead of time before an appointment to see how far the schedule needs to move, forwards or backwards, to match up with a hard set time. It's like life becomes a game, one that draws upon all my rusty math skills from high school pre-cal classes from days gone by.

Speaking of which, reminiscing when you should be trying to go to bed so you can make yourself get up and go get your teeth poked is another excellent time passer. Pre-Cal class is forever burned into my brain, and I said as much in my Facebook status, so you just know I'm speaking the truth. To this day if I have a stress dream it's usually about being late for that math class, or worse yet being back at school and not knowing what class I have next but feeling the sinking sensation of teenage dread that it might be Pre-Cal. I'm gonna say it, that teacher was a genius. He never yelled, he was just the master of looking like he might tear your head off if you came to class 20 seconds late. I always secretly imagined that the other teachers were uber jealous of him because of this power he wielded.

After a leisurely stroll down memory lane I tripped on a rock and found out I hadn't remembered the teacher's name correctly which spurred a whole new brain rattling session to see if I could shake loose the cobwebs that were starting to gather and form sticky barriers between present me and past me.

I need a doppelganger. I would even settle for a machine that would let me borrow my past self from my past and bring her to the future. After showing off my ipod touch which is way cooler than the Star Trek Next Generation tricorder she owns (which only flashes lights and makes woowoowoowoo noises and is 10 times the size of an ipod touch) I'd put her to work making some of the things I have ideas for but haven't made yet. I want to say I haven't made them yet because I haven't had time what with all the memory lane walking, teeth poking and schedule flipping but I read once time is an illusion as is the feeling we don't have enough. So I won't say that. I will say though it's funny how it keeps passing, it's not that there's not enough time, there's not enough ME!

My husband once dreamt that there were two of me. Before your minds go all 21st century kinky, he said that the other me was evil. That I smiled freaky and moved like a snake. So maybe that's an omen, no doppelgangers for me, from the past or otherwise because those scenarios never work out good and the last thing I need is to find myself locked in my garage whilst my other self plays it off like she's this self and tries to steal my husband.

Doppelganger are like zombies, it's not enough to recognize the dangers, you've got to have an emergency plan for fending off the living dead right down to tools set aside for the specific purpose of removing the staircases that lead to our second floor patio where we live, should the day arrive the dead rise.

Zombies made September flip by surprisingly fast as well, which is funny you'd think immersing yourself in a Zombie world for a few days would mean that at the most September would shamble by with occasional lurches and free falls. Nope, not the case.

It's not my fault we dedicated 12 plus hours to a Zombies board game. It's the internet's. Internet showed me a photo of a Zombies!!! game in progress and I was immediately struck with 2 parts jealousy and 1 part enlightenment. There are zombie board games? This I did not know, but after several hours of intensive internet research, first narrowing down which zombie board game I wanted and then where to buy it I found myself once again zipping and slipping through time. A few days later my back hurt from hunching over the hoarde of zombies on our kitchen table as my husband and I battled it out to see who would survive the un-dead.
Handling all the itsy bitsy teeny weenie absolutely adorable zombies made me have strong, almost over powering, urges to customize them with paint jobs etc. A crafter/artist/possible doppelganger has to watch out for sudden attacks of insane creativity. I'm not saying that one of these days won't find me hunched over an itsy bitsy teeny weenie absolutely adorable zombie giving it, ironically, more life by adding some blood and stuff to it's undead guts, but now is not the time. Now IS the time for filling our virtual store shelves with all kinds of goodies for lovely customers to purchase. I have had many a chat with myself, my inner brain self not doppelganger self, about the calendar and the proximity of holidays like Halloween and Christmas and that the time to create for those specific dates draws ever nearer.

So September was spent creating things. A lot of things, and dipping my toes into each of the worlds that emerges with a new character. Whether it's a spooky jack-o-lantern or a perky penguin.
I just finally looked at the calendar and lo it was October, and my hair is still settling from the breeze of September swishing by.

October in California is odd. It's hot, like a grumpy summer, but my calendar listens to no arguments about slowing down, or even pausing time until the heat passes and I can play Autumn with crackle logs and Apple crisps. It cares not that September 09 is now forever just a blurry memory. If it were not for the evidence of a fairly productive month I might even wonder if it happened at all....

** I would like to specify that I did not mean days without salmon, but actually that I always imagine Alaskans to have a lot of salmon and I like salmon and so if it's good enough for them to have a lot of it then by golly it's good enough for me.