Coffee heat rising

Organization

Like a Flash!

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Lightning_strike_jan_2007Twenty minutes till time to shoot out the door for the 7:15 ayem meet in Scottsdale. This post is gonna have to be short & fast, because there’ll be no time for blogging frolics between now and the middle of the night.

So, yes, off to the meeting, where thank God all I have to do is preside, not present.

Then shoot back here, part company with carpooling pal, and shoot out to Staples and Michael’s, there to buy supplies for my latest organizational scheme: another whiteboard, this one to keep track, on a monthly basis, of the book-marketing schemes.

Yesterday I got a start on a few of the several strategies that I’ll be trying out on Slave Labor, which as books go comes under the heading of “test run.” I hope to use Slave Labor as a device to learn as much as I can about producing, marketing, and selling self-published opuses, which with any luck can then be applied to the upcoming, better books, two of which I hope to put out shortly.

Then it’s back to the Funny Farm, here to shovel a three-month-old stack of paper off the desk.

Forgive me, Mammon, for I have sinned. I have not reconciled Your bank account statements for the past three or four months; I have not even looked at Your illustrious bills; I have refused to think about the pile of statements from Your engine of money production, Fidelity…

It is going to take the entire day to plow through that stuff. WonderAccountant has been importuning me to haul this stuff over to her and to set up a new billing system in QuickBooks. I’ve resisted personfully, but  the work can’t be put off any longer. Student papers were graded yesterday, I’ve almost recovered from the last Adventure in Medical Science, and now I’m out of excuses: it is time.

Ugh.

And so {sigh} to work…

Image: Lightning Strike in 2007. fir0002. Flastafffotos.com.au.

The Cool Thing about To-Do Lists…

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…is that you can put stuff on them that you would do anyway, and THEN you can give yourself a hefty dose of satisfaction at checking them off!

√ Put sheets away
√ Roll hair
√ Shower
√ Send out weekly SBA meeting notice

Heh heh heh… I’ve barely begun the day and just look at all the stuff I’ve already got done!

The whiteboard calendar idea is working out exceptionally well. Because it has space for notes or whatever, it lets me write the to-do’s right on it. This means no more little slips of paper all over the house. And of course, because I have to approach the calendar to list the to-do’s and check them off, I’m more likely to read the calendar.

Put that thing up a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t missed a single appointment so far. And I’ve gotten a lot more tasks and projects done, in a timely way. These things are no longer getting overlooked or put off for another day. It really is a very useful time organizing tool.

So what do I actually have to do today?

Meet friends for lunch
Set up auto-pay for new Part D insurance
Go through pile of statements & receipts on desk; prepare for accountant
Read client copy
Read student papers
√ Work on Fire-Rider II, chapter 9
Practice Requiem alto parts
Get stuff to make gazpacho, xergis
Make gazpacho & xergis
Iron pillowcases (in front of Netflix tonight, after dinner, after choir)
√ Write blog post

And so, to work.

😉

The Problem with Writing Reminders to Yourself…

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…is that you have to remember to read them!

Of late I’ve missed a couple of events because I (ahem) forgot them. They were written down on the calendar, all right. I just neglected to look at the calendar that hangs on a wall in my office.

I used to have Google or iCalendar send me those pesky daily reminders. Didn’t take long for me to learn to erase those things from notice. Eventually quit posting appointments & tasks, because the nagging emails were always such a low priority in the foggy universe that is my attention span. And because they annoyed. I came to hate them.

For someone who grew up in the world of analog writing, a physical calendar with a pretty picture to decorate the wall and pretty little squares in which to scribble reminders works a lot better. It does not nag you. It sits there looking handsome and suggesting, quietly, that you take responsibility to look at the damn calendar yourself. In fact, I just bought a 2015 calendar (“Folk Art”: Costco impulse buy).

But now that I’m old, I’ve also come to understand that unless a Note to Self is taped to the kitchen door, where I’ll see it on the way out to the garage, there’s a very good chance I will. not. remember. That’s because I’ll forget to look at the pretty calendar…

On the kitchen door, eh?

So yesterday I ran by Staples and picked up one of those erasable whiteboards with a generic month painted on it. Yup. And stuck it on the door smack-dab at eye level, where I’ll be forced to LOOK AT IT as I fly out the door.

Now we’ll see how long it takes me to learn to space that, too…

Never, I hope: To avoid that, I’m only entering the most important things that are crucial to remember and unusual events that are so far off-routine that they could be easy to forget. All of the rest of the stuff goes on the paper calendar in the office.

This could be the answer to a growing problem. At a certain point, you can write yourself reminders, but it’s no joke to say you may very well forget to read the reminders. With a calendar right in my face, unavoidably, maybe I’ll notice what I’m supposed to be doing before it’s too late.

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Time to Get Back to Work…

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…or whatever passes for it around this place. 😀

This morning it occurred to me that nary a single List has ordered my days since the present “cancer” panic arose. The result of this?

The daily snowfall of paper has mounded up in great dunes atop the desk. Untossed newspapers litter every corner of the house. Dog toys litter the floor of every room. Laundry sits unlaundered. Pillowcases remain unironed (and the cleaning lady is due tomorrow to change the sheets!!). New sheets of mustard algae cling to the pool walls. The wicker chairs I dragged indoors during the no-longer-recent rainstorm still clutter the dining room. The potted rose on the east side is almost dead from missing one day‘s watering. Food is running low. Worse yet, booze is running low. Bills are unpaid. A fistful of diddly little checks from Medicare and Medigap gather dust on the desktop. Grit tickles the bottoms of my feet as I walk around the house. Empty ant traps, covered with an old fan cage and weighted down under a heavy brick to keep them out of puppy mouth’s reach, still sit on the deck. The untrained puppy is turning into a little Nero.

Lordie, but things go to Hell on a skateboard fast!

So what have I been doing while I wasn’t doing all the things that need to be done to keep the Funny Farm humming along?

This:

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and this…

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and these…

P1030190As usual, click on the images for a larger, sharper view.

Today I’ll deliver about a half-dozen of these to the church, whereinat we hope to sell them to raise funds for the choir. I expect we can offer them after the summer’s over and normal people come back into town and start to show up at houses of worship. And my friend Carol, who is RC and a cantor at her church, recently volunteered to organize a fair to raise funds for that church — she suggested we rent a booth there and see if we can drum up some interest among their parishioners.

I wish my camera would do justice to those glass crosses, handmade by our extraordinarily talented Doug Thomas. One of them is just amazing: it’s made of dichroic glass. When you lay it down or simply hold it flat and look at it from above, its color appears as this incandescent red-orange flame, with an abstract blue cross over it. Pick the thing up and look at it, and suddenly it’s a sky-blue transparency.

Sort of like this…

P1030187…and this.

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Kind of. But  not exactly. Stupid camera.

Some months ago, Carol gave me a stone cross of unknown provenance. It’s been waiting to be made into something…and so, why not?

If rosary it is to be, the challenge is to avoid clunkiness. This critter starts out chunky and invites a certain macho swagger.

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Designing these things is a process of trial and error. I find myself spending a couple days on each one, fiddling with beads and spacers and color combinations and sizes. Just now, I think simplicity is going to be the soul of this particular rosary. At the moment, the proposed combination consists of 10 mm fancy agate (I think that’s what they are) pater beads with 6 mm rondelles of African jade for the decades. The rondelles are separated only by a single gold-colored glass seed bead. I’m not sure that sets them far enough apart for the supplicant to pray on them…but add even a couple of very tiny silver spacers, and they get loosey-goosey and out of proportion.

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Gr. The colors are so much prettier than this! Oh well.

It’s hard to guess what they’re going to look like before you actually string them. The effect is always different and usually better than the rough design laid out on your board. Here’s the invitatory section (albeit still in draft):

P1030199I think these will be nice with the stone cross, kind of manly and cowboy-looking. If there are any manly cowboys out there who pray the rosary, this is the set of beads for you! 😉

LOL! So much better than working.

But alas, I’m afraid the vacation is over. And a new to-do List is in place:

• Pick up house
• Pay bills
• Enter data in Quickbooks
• Inflict bookkeeping on accountant
• File piles of paper
• Ride herd on subcontractor: WHERE is that index?
• Get in touch w/ client: WHERE is new copy?
• Get in touch w/ other client: WHERE is their new copy?
• Call associate editor: arrange to take her out to lunch/dinner ASAP
• Relight fire under designers
• Figure out how to upload to CreateSpace
• Drop off rosaries at church office
• AJ’s: fruit, salad stuff, other edibles
• Michael’s: look for and examine peridot-colored Swarovski crystals
• Order peridot-colored Swarovski crystals from Fire Mountain
• Scrape down the pool walls again
• Check pool chemicals
• Figure out the best time to can the pool dude, hevvin help us!
• Water outdoor plants NOW not later
• Finish writing current scene in Fire-Rider, Book II
• Figure out how to negotiate pen-name for Fire-Rider publicity. How to make THAT work?
• Find a template and ask Jesse to set up website NOW not later
• After dark, walk pup, practice leash-training

Oh, dear God. Why can’t I make a living stringing beads?

Farming Out the Chores: Opportunity Cost Recovered!

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I’m in love with Luz, the marvelous new housecleaner! To begin with, she cleans one heck of a lot better than I do. And to end with, this lady is making it possible for me to spend my time earning instead of scrubbing!

Today opened with a list of 26 to-do’s, extreme even for moi. None of them had to do with cleaning house.

Luz appeared on the scene shortly after I left to teach the high-intensity Eng. 102 section. She worked for about six or eight hours, doing a job that would take me about four hours to accomplish…but doing it about twice as well as I would have done it. Had I decided to do the housecleaning myself today, it would have left time and energy for me to accomplish exactly two of those 26 to-do’s: teach the class and drop by the credit union on the way home.

But…while she was here shoveling out the Funny Farm, I managed to get through all of these:

  1. Download examples of citation and documentation from old editorial documents, to use as demo material for students
  2. Compare diet/cookbook’s table of contents with 150 typeset pages, figure out what on earth the e-book designer is complaining about, and fix it (this, it developed, was a BIG job)
  3. Enter website wrangler’s invoice in Quickbooks
  4. Meet and teach class (with commute time  & item 5, occupied 4 hours)
  5. Drive to credit union; deposit $1150 worth of checks to The Copyeditor’s Desk
  6. Find the lost membership card to the Desert Botanical Garden
  7. Reconnect repaired brand-new pool cleaner (it picked up a rock!); test; run
  8. Read two sets of student papers (another fairly large job)
  9. Walk dogs one mile (actually, did that in the early hours, before anything else came down)
  10. Do physical therapy exercises (ditto)
  11. Cook five pounds of dog meat; store for future processing
  12. E-mail associate editor to coordinate workload while she’s in China
  13. Intercept request for work from dubious client
  14. E-mail associate editor to see if she wants to do work for dubious client
  15. Send proposal to dubious client

Okay. Those last three were not on the To-Do list as of 5:30 a.m. They did surface in the afternoon. But otherwise…not bad, I’d say: 13 out of 26 items. Tomorrow no student papers are coming in, so I may get through the remaining 14 (plus a few regular Wednesday events) tomorrow. If I’d taken it into my feeble little mind to clean the house this afternoon, about all I would’ve done would have been to meet the class and deliver the checks, since cleaning would have occupied the rest of the day and left me too pooped to pop.

 In other words, the opportunity cost represented by four hours of housecleaning was recovered by hiring Luse to do the unproductive scutwork. During all the time she was heaving, hauling, scrubbing, and scouring, I was doing things that either do make money or probably will make money.

A-a-a-n-d…the sheets are clean, the dust in which one could write one’s name is gone from the furniture, the stove is clean, the kitchen counters are gleaming, the bathroom glows in the dark, the floors no longer feel gritty underfoot, the throw rugs have been hauled outside and beaten, the deck and the back patio have been swept, dusted, and cleaned, the Arcadia doors are so clean they look like they’re hanging open… So, so worth it!

I don’ wanna work Monday

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Nrfl. How can I count the WAYS I don’t wanna work?

A fine long list of To-Do’s was short-circuited by the unwelcome calendar reminder of the appointment to have the boobs X-rayed at mid-day. Ugh!

This bifurcated (heh! as it were!!!) the 87 gerjillion chores stacked up to be done, since rather little gets done (realistically, even if one drags one’s computer along) while one is cooling one’s heels in a waiting room with a GD television set blathering away.

So far I’ve managed to…

• Send course materials to Copy Center (took all of about 90 seconds)
• Contact disgruntled client (30 seconds)
• Update AMEX charges; find out how much was really charged after the $1795 in insurance premiums was racked up (about 10 minutes; approx $300 over budget)
• Add to that task: figure out WTF!!!?? (veterinarian bills, veterinarian bills, veterinarian bills)
• Contact associate editor; discuss summer’s work strategy while she’s junketing around China
• Get effing mammogram

We could add to those:

• Engage part of strategy described in last post — to relieve stress — by hiring neighbor’s non-English-speaking cleaning lady
• Figure out how to pay N-E-S-CL when there’s no GD cash in the house (exchange check for cash with neighbor)

And to that we can add:

• Respond to prospective client who had been presumed lost
• Negotiate delay in indexing volume of Anglo-Saxon maritime history to accommodate challenges of “teaching” a four-week comp course while sidekick is running around Asia

But we could say that ONE of us has not yet done…

• Read copy
• Read copy
• Read copy
• Respond to ALL “unread/flagged IMPORTANT” e-mail messages
• Pick up house for new N-E-S-CL
• Separate out rags that will scratch furniture from those that will not scratch furniture
• Pay Jesse
• Ask Jesse if he can work any magic to compensate for new STUPID stuff inflicted by latest WordPress “update”
• Mix new bottle of tile/glass cleaner for N-E-S-CL
• Meet associate editor at fave restaurant for (probably monumentally expensive) dinner to celebrate her latest amazing achievement
• Contact BlueHost; cancel everything there and demand money back

All of which leaves us with a question: WHY are there always more things to do than there are hours in the day to do them??????