Ugh

I’ve got pix and stories, yes.  LOTS.

I’ve also had an auditing final and an advanced accounting midterm… BBS

Road Warrior

on the road :: comfort inn, sandusky, oh

Got an email from a friend wanting to know how I GTD on vacation…. Here’s your answer.

A) MacBook Pro.  I never leave home without it anymore.
B) True Writer Fountain pen by my good friends at Levenger, which goes with…
C) Moleskine (with apple logo sticker!)
D) Jr. Circa notebook.

Freakin’ exhausted but I do have some good road stories to tell. More when I can stay awake.

My GTD system…

my office :: finally clean :: october seventh, two thousand seven

I’ve noticed that I have a lot of resistance to using spaces that don’t make me happy.  I’m not a big fan of my office because I don’t like the way the painting came out… so my office is almost always a mess.  Just another reason to stay out of it.

It’s amazing what finding Levenger desk sets on sale can do to inspire me to finally get the mess under control.  (And some unscheduling and GTD didn’t hurt either.) (For those really curious, I bought the entire Claremont set and it came out to about 50% off. I can’t even tell you how long I’ve wanted that set…)

Here’s what command central looks like.  All the wood furniture on the desk is the Levenger set. You can’t see it, but behind the chair is my hPDA dock.  I use a pocket ruled moleskine as my go everywhere inbox.  EVERYTHING goes in it. Notes, receipts, MTBA charlie cards, you name it. (I LOVE the pocket in the back!) I have a tiny pocket sized calendar there (with “It’s time to crank the widgets” on it).  I also keep a Jr. sized Circa notebook with a personalized cover there as well.  (Right now, the cover features reunion pictures of me, the other half of my brain and my little brother.) Inside the Circa, I have bits of two sets of the old colored tab dividers—blue, red, green, red, blue—I like it better balanced.

The Circa is divided as follows:

• In front of the first tab: NA lists—@ computer, @calls, @errands, @home, @ waiting for and some smurfed 3” x 5” index cards
• Behind the blue tab: Levenger Things To Do checklists -> Auditing and Advanced Accounting classes—all homework due dates
• Behind the red tab: Random lists—Info on the trip to Ohio, books to read, pre-project brain dumps (If I think I want to do something, I write down everything I can think of.  During my not-quite-weekly-or-even-monthly review, I decide if it stays on my radar, goes S/M, or becomes a real live project.
• Behind the green tab: unused Levenger Project/Goal Planner forms. (Not a huge fan of these, Corrie has some nice ones that just don’t quite do it for me… I may do my own. Someday.)
• Behind the second red tab: more lined Circa paper
• Behind the second blue tab: more Things to Do pages

This is really my second go at GTD.  I tried it & went to a Roadmap - got really excited, refined my system, was cranking widgets like there was no tomorrow and then fell off the wagon HARD when school and work got incredibly busy and I couldn’t be arsed to keep it up.  (Right when I should have dug in deeper… *sigh*) After work calmed down a bit, I got back into it there and it’s paid off in spades! I’m trying to bring it back to my personal life.

I’m having a little success - my biggest problem is that I’m impatient and have trouble deciding what’s a real project vs a S/M.  I’m also still having trouble with the contexts and really drilling down to the next action.  I don’t know why work can be so concrete and my personal life so fuzzy. My guess is that at work, I’m truely “cranking widgets” (invoices into QB, invoices into inventory system, invoices into QB, lather, rinse, repeat).  Home is more like “an amorphous blob of undoability”.  “Fix shower in bathroom”—yeah I can break that down into N/A, but then I get all freaked out about it.  It’s our (unfriendly & unskilled) builder’s fault it’s broken; repairing it means ripping out the kitchen wall (and dishwasher and cabinets) and I just can’t go there right now financially or emotionally.  “Paint scrapbook room” - do I really HAVE to? (All the next actions in the world won’t get me motivated there.)

Writing that out, I just realized my problem.  I’m a planner.  I think eighty steps ahead of where I should start, so before I even commit the item to paper, I’m all freaked out about the zillion steps it will take to get from “paint scrapbook room” to “finally enjoy being in scrapbook room”.  Maybe I should just really focus on the next action & the proper context, huh? *grin*

It’s Sunday night, it’s the start of a new week, and my office is clean… maybe it’s a good time to do a review.

ETA: Dave gets my GTD at home problem. I feel better now.

Out of character (for here, at least)

SAVE THE BOOBIES!!!!

It’s time!
It’s time!
It’s time!
It’s time!
It’s time!

Um, yeah.  I’m just a little excited about boobiemonth.

Open your wallet, grab your camera, and give ‘till it hurts. It’s boobie saving time!

What started as a joke of sorts between some friends a few years ago became an interweb phenomena… Now, it’s grown up into a serious fundraiser for both Komen and whatever “Bloggers Helping Bloggers” charity has been chosen. (You can read all about it on the official site. - Main page is ALWAYS SFW.) The rules are simple - you can see boobies for free, you can donate, or you can donate more and gain access to the Pay-Per-Boobie area.

PLEASE NOTE: This has always been light-hearted.  It is NOT exploitation. It is NOT soft-core pr0n. If it offends you, go find something else to do with your time. Me, I’m going to make a big fatty donation in Momma P’s name like I do every year. And maybe show some skin… you never know.

Ghosts

rowboats :: perkin’s cove, ogunquit, me :: sometime in 2002

Although I work in Maine and have to cross the “Bridge over the River Pi” (as my dad used to call it) every day, it still feels weird not to spend a week on Short Sands Beach.

I can eat at my favorite restaurant, can take even more pix of the Nubble Light, go to Brown’s for ice cream and travel to Ogunquit whenever I want.  And I take advantage of that.  Sometimes.  Perkin’s Cove and the Marginal Way is forever linked with my father in a way that time has not been able to dull. I can eat at BCH and do the Nubble (& Brown’s on the way back)... but when I walk the Marginal Way, I honestly don’t feel like I’m walking around alone.

It’s a weird feeling.  Even now.  Looking at this (heavily photoshopped) pic, I can literally feel him standing behind my chair.  It makes me wonder why that, of all places in Maine, is linked so strongly with him in my memory.  It certainly wasn’t our favorite place - that would be the Nubble.  Even though I feel him at the Nubble, its nothing like being in Ogunquit.

I don’t know why this is on my mind today, but it is. For whatever reason, I miss him terribly today.