You know what? Doing something truly new every single day is not all that easy. It’s only Day Seven, or, as we say phonetically in Mongolian, “dahshawr,” and I wish, like God, that I could take the day off and just bask in the glory of the accomplishments of the last six days.

But no. A challenge is a challenge, and onward I forge, despite the fact that I’ve also learned it’s not all that easy to gauge what new things will be easy and what new things will be hard.

Take learning to count to ten in Mongolian, which I figured would be pretty easy. Wrong.

I did expect that finally doing a headstand for the first time in my life would be hard, but I also expected that with the help of my youthful companion, I would be able to do it. Wrong again.

So today, on Day Seven, I felt like doing something super-easy, like painting my toenails an entirely new shade that isn’t the bright green they’ve been painted for close to a year now. Yet here I am in a Comfort Inn in Cody, Wyoming, with no access to any nail polish beyond the bottle of bright green.

But lo, what do we have here? Why, it’s a large paper clip, right on the desk next to me.

This large paper clip reminds me of when the youngest of my youthful companions was in first grade and made herself a necklace out of paper clips, a nice complement to the collection of shark tooth necklaces she was then fond of wearing. She wore her paper clip necklace to school the day she made it.

I was a little nervous that the paper clip necklace wouldn’t go over well, but I said nothing, of course, and of course –something I could have guessed now but not back then, when she was tiny– within days, most of the kids in her class were also wearing paper clip necklaces.

So, in honor of the youthful companion, and also because this is the easiest new thing I could think of, I sally forth with a brand-new earring.