How to Go Outside Your Comfort Zone in Ten Short Days

If I've been called dizzy or unbalanced, now I know why.

Writing tonight in response to a reader who asked why I haven't posted lately.
Here is how to go outside your comfort zone in just ten short days:

• Attend the three-day Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop on the Dayton Riviera with many of the funniest writers and comics in the world--which will inspire you yet also prompt you to question if you're not better suited for working at Walmart. 
• Plan this trip far enough ahead so you don't know it will coincide with impending deadlines at your day job--the one that pays your heating bill when it's still snowing in April.
• Plow through nearly 100 scholarship applications and then try to schedule interviews with 18 college students, who are academic stars yet can't comprehend the concept of checking email or listening to voice mail.
• Realize you scheduled yourself for FIVE speaking engagements this week within a FIVE-DAY period. Ponder the idea that you should probably decide what to talk about.
• Attempt to tackle your accountant's last-minute tax questions, which sadly require an algebraic equation to answer. And you flunked high school algebra.
• Impulsively contact a realtor about putting your house on the market, and then realize this may require doing something about the towering piles of items you've been hoarding in the basement.
• Spend a week on the phone, trying to schedule an appointment with an evasive specialist for a fairly minor--yet nagging--health issue, which is likely to result in surgery. Your last surgery resulted in four months of an anesthesia-induced brain fog. Make a note to plug four totally useless months into your schedule.
• Attempt all of the above--which seems dizzying enough--while enduring your third straight month of vertigo. If you've been called dizzy and unbalanced, now you understand.

So, if you don't hear from me for a while, I'll see you on the other side. I'll be posting from my basement.