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Archive for October, 2009

Randomness galore!

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

No one else thinks my filing cabinet is as exciting as I do? Amazing!

How about random happenings from the last several days?

Last night Justin and I went to look at a car. We’re not sure about it yet; the owner isn’t sure if her daughter isn’t going to snatch it up yet, either. So we’re waiting to hear back from the owner on whether or not it’s actually for sale. And then trying to decide if it’s worth buying. We’re still thinking.

Tomorrow night I’m going to my first practice with the music team at church. It’s been a long time since I’ve sung with a church group (and even longer since I sang with a group other than church or family) so I’m a little anxious about it. They’ve got me on a sort of probationary thing, where I’m joining them for practices for 4 weeks so they can decide whether I fit in or not. I’m excited about the opportunity, but I’m also nervous about it.

Monday I brought brownies in for a meeting about 5S and had a frustrating meeting with not enough people about the problems going down. There’s been a lack of communication and a whole lot of frustrations and it’s not been handled as well as I would like. It’s still not great, but I’m (possibly blindly) hoping that things are going to get better soon.

I’ve worked out most of my macro problems in my Lean project! I’m still not clear on how some of it works, but I’m getting a much more thorough understanding of it as I go. I’ve gotten through 2 of my major milestones (with some minor tweaking still needed there, but it’s mostly set) and now I’m onto number 3. And it’s different and a little more complicated, but I’m hopeful to have it worked out before too long.

Except it’s tabled right now because I have a project that’s actually in my job description to do so I have to finish that one first. And it’s a very long and boring project. Long. And boring. And I have to finish it before my deadline, so it’s what I’ve been spending most of my time on the last couple days.

I heard a good idea lately about how to get past a writing block. Two good ideas, actually. But they fall under the “Draft Zero” concept. Anything you write is going to have to be edited several times, so the first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it can be absolutely awful. And if you rewrite the whole thing, that’s fine. But some of us get stuck wanting to have the first draft be something great! To have what’s on the page reflect what’s in our head. For it to be this fantastic piece of work. And it’s just not going to happen.

A zero draft is a draft that you know without a doubt that you’re going to rewrite. It’s very freeing because you can write absolute crap and go “Meh, whatever, I’ll do it better on my first draft.” And a great way to make sure that you have to rewrite the whole dang thing is through a couple of options. You could write the whole thing in the wrong tense, write everything in present tense when it should be in past tense. Or write it by hand.

So I finally have a great reason to write in this notebook I’ve been holding on to since forever. I have something like five journals sitting on my bookshelf that haven’t been written in because I just don’t write in a journal very often lately. If it’s something really heavy on my brain that I can’t write about here, then I’ll head there. But it’s just not something I feel the need to do very often. But I *love* journals. They’re so pretty! And I wish so often that I had a reason to write in them. And I’ve had this idea for a play rolling around in my head for a couple years. I’m writing my zero draft in one of those journals. And I’m scribbling and jumping around and making notes and writing dialog and having a grand old time writing a lot of really awful stuff. And I’ve made more progress in a couple days than I’ve made in years of thinking about this project. It’s so freeing!

My journal

And then I pulled out another journal this morning and brought it to work so I could log my food, since I can’t go online and do that. I want to log my food and start losing weight again, but I get stuck on how hard it is to remember exactly what I’ve done during the day. Eventually, I’ll get back to pre-logging my food and all that, but right now I’m at square one and just trying to figure out what the heck I’m stuffing into my mouth all day long. Hopefully this journal will help with that whole project, too.

But I don’t want to talk about my weight or my eating right now. I’m not ready to do that yet. There’s been too much negativity about that in my head for so long that I can’t handle approaching it yet. But I’m making steps to get beyond that and hopefully things will be changing there soon, too.

Anyway! Did you know that those fingernail decal stickers that you get at the store are just about the perfect size to put at the end of push-pins? It takes them from blah to fantastic really fast. And I took a length of ribbon and hung it on my cubical wall to hold all my binder clips because they were just jumbled in a mess before and now they’re easy to get to and cute to boot!

And that’s enough of my randomness.

Have a great day!

Tags: babbling about nothing much at all, body issues, having to do with cars, having to do with church, having to do with work, this post contains pictures, what i did with my day, writing about writing
Posted in Living! |

Organizing my file cabinet!!

Monday, October 5th, 2009

So this is the truly geekiness that is my love for organizing. I spent almost my entire weekend (the last three days) organizing my file cabinet.

It’s a 2-drawer, double-width file cabinet. The top drawer is active files or files that are important enough to have up top. And the bottom is the archive space for things that need to be kept for a while but I don’t need to see, possibly ever again. But it was a mess! The last time I went through was probably this time last year. Things seemed pretty organized up through September of last year in a lot of cases.

The big exception was what was taking up most of the bottom drawer. Several months ago, we got a box full of paperwork from Justin’s mom—medical records, school loans paperwork, all these things that I’d been wondering where they were hiding and suddenly I had them! Which was great! But I didn’t have places to put them yet, so they got stuck randomly into folders and stashed away, with the plans of organizing them “soon.”

Friday afternoon I got home, paid the bills, balanced the checkbook, and decided it was Time to Tackle the Mess.

It’s amazing how something as thin as paper can make such a heavy mess.

Also, it’s sometimes really complicated to work someone else’s filing system into your own.

And yeah, it took me from Friday afternoon all the way through Sunday afternoon to finish it up. But now that I’m done? Ooooooh . . . . It’s a thing of beauty.

(Geek!)

Anyway, some thoughts about organizing and how I managed my project. First off, I went through the active files to see what was happening there. Mostly they were good. There were a few that hadn’t had anything added for a while, either it’s someone we don’t use anymore or we’ve gone paperless or something. If the file wasn’t used in 2009, I pulled it to put with the archived info. And then I separated the data from previous years and paper clipped them together with a sticky note telling which year it was for. This one thing is going to be a HUGE time saver later on.

And then I figured out how I was going to categorize the files. I’d started to do this last time—I had a bills section and a loans section, each holding things that had to do with bills (water, electric, cable) or loans (credit cards, school loans, car loan). Now I also have Automobile, Banking, and Work categories, and a few others.

I didn’t finish up on the top, though, before I hit the bottom. I pulled out the things that were basically already organized first, just because I felt like doing the easy stuff first and then the harder, but that’s totally up to personal preference. Again, I sorted out by year so I could see what was what, labeling with sticky notes for easy reference. I also put sticky notes on the hanging folders so I could flip through quickly. This one took me a while to figure out but after digging and digging and digging to find the stupid VSAC folders, I finally just put notes on all of the folders and saved myself much time and frustration.

Slowly, I made my way through old bank statements, medical expenses, pay stubs, and so many other things. I had to take the papers from my mother in law and integrate them into my own system, which probably took me the longest. Some of what she sent was duplicates of information I already had, some was integrated, but not duplicated, and a lot of it was totally new to me. So I found what it was, how it fit into the scheme, and organized it by year.

And then I made up a label template on Word, typed up the labels for all the new folders, categorized into sections, naturally, and printed them off. A little bit of cutting and labeling, and now my file cabinet is fantastic!

There are still a handful of things I need to address—like how long to keep a few things. I’d assume I could throw them away, but I’m going to double-check it before I do. Plus, it’s good research. I didn’t go through one of the folders yet just because it was more than my brain could handle in one weekend, but I’m planning to get through it “soon.” I promise!

But it’s absurd how very pleased I am with myself about this project. I kept dragging Justin in to look at my progress. I had papers strewn all over the floor of my office, stacks of full and empty folders on my trunk and the top of the file cabinet, and paperclips and sticky notes and pens everywhere. But the files didn’t have paper popping out of the top and I could find what I was looking for and they’re all paper clipped together with sticky notes saying the year!

And did I mention that the reason that’s helpful is because at the end of the year, I’ll pull out the papers from this year, paper clip them together with a 2009 sticky note and put them in the archived folder, pull out anything past its expiration date, and be done with organizing for the (first half) of the year in less than 30 minutes? Yeah. That’s going to be sweet.

These are the kind of things that get me excited.

Pictures!