I'm on my third cup of coffee and the washing machine is running the first load. I woke up this morning with a reasonable amount of ambition and I need to channel it. It's time to focus on the finish line of a lot of long-running projects, fiberly and Otherwise.

First the Otherwise: While I have a gawgeous new kitchen and a functional if still somewhat undecorated guest room, my daughter's old room and the garage look like the set of Sanford & Son. It's really hideous. Especially Girlchild's old room - it's at the end of the hall and a guest looks straight down into chaos - bits of this and that that don't fit anywhere else, boxes of books and kitchen doodads to be donated to charity, CDs to be hauled to the secondhand CD store to see if they're worth anything, the old ironing board, etc. It's a freaking disaster in there. The garage is the same, but more so.

It's too hot to tackle the garage, it's going to have to wait until fall because I'm not willing to die for it, but today marks the start of the great cleanout of Girlchild's former room. I will take at least one carload of miscellany to Goodwill today. Yes, I will.

Part two of Otherwise is the long talked-about and procrastinated task of losing the final 15 pounds. I could say the final 10, that probably would do, but 15 would definitely look better. I lost the first 15 and stopped. I've gone from pushing out of size 12 and almost into 14s to comfortably in size 10s. I have maintained the weight loss, gained none of it back, I really have adjusted and improved my eating habits thanks to following the South Beach guidelines. I'd say I live on Phase 3, but that sounds so much more structured than my actual eating habits. I just watch my portions and mostly avoid junk carbs and try to get a high nutritional bang for my buck, and by now it's instinctive and I don't really think about it or feel like I'm "on a diet," because I'm not.

But it's time to start thinking about being "on a diet" again, because fall is coming and trials are coming and that means I will have to drop some buckage at Ann Taylor to look appropriate in the courtroom. And if I am going to spend Ann Taylor sized bucks, I want to spend them on size 8 clothes, not 10s, because dammit, it matters to me.

It has taken months for it to start mattering to me again - after losing "the first half" of my excess poundage I stopped thinking about it - I felt relatively thin and it felt good. It's like I had to stop halfway to my goal to make a mental adjustment, and now that I have, I'm no longer content with halfway there.

On that note, I paused in composing this and took Murphy for a nice long walk, then put in a half hour of backyard cleanup - a half hour is all I could stand. It is over 80 out there already and the humidity is unreal - sweat doesn't evaporate in weather like this. It's 8 a.m. and already time to move to indoor tasks.

It just seems demented to think about knitting in weather like this, and yet it's necessary if I want to have things to wear when it's cooler. Today I will felt the blue and green bag and plan the next round of projects. I want a poncho. I can't decide if I want to knit or crochet it, and I have to sift through my supersized stash to see what I have in the poncho prospects - though I will cheat on my yarn diet over Labor Day I am really determined to cut the stash in half by the end of this year. Which means I need to give up sleeping, home improvement projects and my career, and maybe get a bionic right arm. Who am I kidding???