Posted on 10 Comments

Greetings from the abyss

Hi. Remember me? I used to blog here. I got on this “organizational tear” for the last two days that completely consumed me. I’ll save you the gory details, but in a nutshell, I finally found an alternate calendar and a task management system to try so that I could stop using Outlook. I’ve been using Thunderbird for my email for at least a year, and having to run two separate programs for my schedule and my email wasn’t cutting it. In fact, I was avoiding opening up Outlook altogether, and as such pretty much ignoring my schedule. That wasn’t really working for me lately…

Halloween

Anyway, it took two days of trial-and-error, testing, setting up difference scenarios & then changing my mind and trying something else, but I think I’m happy at this point. I’m ready to get uber-organized, and keep up with all of my responsibilities. The only thing I miss in my new setup is a way to sync with my Palm. That’s not as important as it used to be, though. I haven’t been carrying my Palm with me much these days. With luck, somebody will develop an appropriate hotsync conduit before too long. I should be able to wait.

Halloween

I made another scarf like the others – spread out the work over the course of the week – and I really love it. I haven’t photographed it yet, but I will tomorrow, while I’m wearing it, since it’s for me. Heh. I have three more destined for the shop, that I hope to finish this weekend.

Halloween

Guess you noticed the gratuitous kid pictures? The pirate got his costume out of his aunt’s box of “things she got at theme nights at the club” (there were several pirates at school, but I bet the others didn’t have a flamboyant silver skull and crossbones on their hats. heh.). The dragon wore a costume that his brother wore for the two previous years. Never thought we’d get so much mileage out of a last-minute $10 Wal-Mart purchase.

One more Halloween over, three more bowls of candy to try and keep my hands out of…

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Posted on 10 Comments

10 thoughts on “Greetings from the abyss

  1. 🙂 The boys look great. Of course I live and die in Outlook and it automagically synchs with my phone, and so I’m now uber hyper aware of all of my meetings. I actually have my travel time in my calendar for whenever I leave the house. Oy.

    1. Some people would run away screaming at the thought of being that organized and scheduled. It sounds heavenly to me 😉

      Outlook was crawling on my system and my setup now is so much faster. The big drawback, of course, is that lack of integration for taking it on the road. At this particular moment, that’s not too much of a bother.

  2. Getting organized takes time (something contradictory about that, isn’t there?) but I know it makes us feel better when we do it. I’m glad you were able to take some time to put this into action. I use Outlook a lot but also the old-fashioned paper calendar.

    The costumes are cute and I hope they had a blast on Halloween.

    See what Junie Moon has been blogging about: Blessings Friday: Celebrating Your Creativity

    1. Yep, I feel so much better having my schedule greet me every morning when I turn on my computer.

      And thanks, they did have fun.

  3. whew…I thought the halloween monsters had gotten you! The kids look so dang cute! remember…1 ounce through the lips=20 pounds on the hips. Leave the candy for the kids!

    See what Kathi has been blogging about: Closer to Hannukah

    1. Oh my. I’m in for at least 200 lbs on my hips by those calculations.

  4. You do know that Thunderbird has a calendar extension called Lightning, right? 🙂

    1. Yeah, actually, I was so excited when I found out about that. I had already set up the Google calendar, but you can subscribe to your Google calendar through Lightning, so I did that. And then I set about moving my tasks from Outlook, which was no easy feat, given Outlook’s lack of useful export formats.

      The problem? Thunderbird’s repeating tasks don’t behave like you would expect a recurring task to behave. It will repeat every day, but only if you don’t mark it “complete.” That, in my opinion, is completely useless, so I went in search of something else.

      Remember the Milk can also be subscribed to via Lightning, but I ultimately decided to disable Lightning altogether. Since I can access both Google calendar and RTM online, it didn’t really make sense to bloat up Thunderbird with the extras. Having them enabled was slowing down Thunderbird almost as badly as Outlook, unfortunately.

      That was probably way more detail than you wanted 🙂

  5. […] It could be worse. Most of the games they play on the computer have significant educational value. When they watch TV, they are watching either PBS, or DVDs from our collection. And often (as is this case this very minute) the TV seems to just be there for background noise. A few minutes ago, they set the language to French (on purpose), quickly got bored because they couldn’t understand what anyone was saying, and proceeded to play some imaginative game completely unrelated to what the French Backyardigans were doing. This kind of thing happens a lot. So, they’re not playing shoot-em-up games all day or being barraged with harmful advertising, but they are missing things with their eyes on the screen so much. I need to think about ways to restructure our days and minimize the amount of time we spend being passively entertained, and now is a good time to do it, while I’m working on tasks, calendars & scheduling. […]

  6. […] Good thing it was delicious, because the recipe made quite a bit.  As part of my “get organized” initiative, I’m planning our meals for the week, and giving each day a “theme.”  Mondays […]

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