But if you call, I’ve got voicemail set up now and hopefully it’ll let me know when I’ve missed a call by letting me know I’ve got voicemail.  So feel free to call!  And I’ll call you back when I figure out how.

In other news, I’ve got a snippet of a song stuck in my head and I need your help to figure it out. It’s just the lyrics for a tiny part of the song, but I can’t find it online.  It’s a song from when I was in high school, I think.  Maybe college.  I’m not sure.  But the only part of the song I can remember is this:

“Just trying to take a left, just trying to take a left, just trying to take a left! Why are you trying to take a left?”

Any ideas?  Please let me know; it’s driving me crazy.

 Justin and I determined that we don’t really watch TV.  So what was the point in paying for it to be delivered to our house?  Justin did a bunch of work chatting with our cable provider and for an additional $5/month, removed about $70 from our monthly bill, cleared space in our media cabinets by taking out the cable boxes, and removed live TV from our lives entirely.

Yay!

We then turned around and put some of that money into Hulu Plus, which will satisfy most of our television wants, along with the websites for those actual shows.  So, TV?  Fixed.

Then we went and ended our relationship with Verizon and started new terms with Sprint.  So far, it’s been a rocky relationship.  I haven’t been able to get access to the information I want on their website and their customer service has been *really* annoying.

On the other hand, I spent my whole weekend playing around with my very shiny new smart phone.  It’s an LG Optiumus S.  It’s purple.  It has things on there that tell me the weather and what movies are showing nearby and where to find cheap gas and MY CALENDAR and my to do list (though that one’s still a work in progress) and oh, my gosh, it’s SO AWESOME.  *cue the kid at the end of The Incredibles movie there*

Unfortunately, it turns out we don’t actually have cell service at our house.  So we’re looking at what we can do about that because phones that don’t actually work, while they’re very pretty, are kind of pointless.  And, since there’s no service, I haven’t set up my voicemail yet, so if you call and get a weird answer, that’d be why.

But it was fun and terribly distracting sitting there with my brand new phone going “Oh!  What does THAT do?!”  Plus, I couldn’t get my contacts list to transfer over so I had to do that all by hand.  The bonus there is that my whole physical address book just became obsolete because it’s all stored electronically now.

Oh!  Our phone numbers stayed the same, by the way.  So you don’t have to worry about that.

And my podcasts upload automatically!  I have so many stories to listen to now!!

Anyway, it’s my first Android phone, so I’m still stumbling my way though stuff.  If any of you more experienced users have any advice, I’d love to hear it.

We went to see the new X-Man movie over the weekend, too!  It was very good.  I enjoyed it a whole lot.  You have to ignore some continuity problems, if you’re the kind of person who notices that type of thing, but I thought it was a lot of fun.  It made me gasp in surprise and alarm and made me really sad in some spots and made me laugh at points and I thought it was an entirely enjoyable experience.

A very happy belated birthday to Amy and Isaac and belated happy anniversary to Mom and Dad!  I’m sorry I didn’t call any of you (or you, Erica, for our regular chat) but I figured you’d mostly be busy, plus, like I said, no cell service.  But I hope you all had a delightful day!!

Edited to add:  I just wanted to say how tickled I am right now about how my phone has improved my outlook for this afternoon.  This morning, while getting ready for work, I checked the weather on my phone.  And it told me that it would rain this afternoon.  So I brought my umbrella into the office, even though there were clear blue skies.  It’s been thundering for the last 30 minutes (I can’t see outside to know what else is happening) and I am SO HAPPY that I have my big umbrella for what sounds like a wet walk out to my car.

Last night for dinner, we had honey mustard chicken.

• Take 2 breasts of chicken, salted and peppered to taste
• Mix together:
  • ¼ cup of honey
  • ¼ cup of spicy mustard
  • ½ teaspoon of paprika
  • ½ teaspoon of parsley
  • ½ teaspoon of basil
• Put the chicken in a small, lightly greased baking dish and spoon half the mixture over the chicken.
• Bake it at 350* for 30 minutes.
• Turn the chicken over and spoon the rest of the mix over that side.
• Bake it for another 15 minutes or so, until the juices run clear and you’re sure the chicken is done.

I ate it over spaghetti squash.  Next time I do this, I’ll remember that the squash will need to cook hotter and longer than the chicken because it was still a little crunchy when I took it out.

Yesterday the VP over my area had his monthly performance review meeting and I had to give a quick presentation on the 5S status in the area.  To give you an idea of how out of my depth I was in that company, let me quickly explain my organizational chart.  First there’s me.  I report to A. He reports to B.  B is the group head for my department.  B. reports up to C, who’s the director of several departments.  There are several level B guys under C.  C. is one of several directors who report up to D.  D. is one of several VPs who report up to the president of the company.  I’m pretty sure that broadly covers how we’re organized.  So yesterday, I gave a presentation to the level D. guy for my area.  I don’t do a lot of public speaking and especially not to people who get paid that much.  Hopefully I didn’t stumble around too much and I hope I answered all his questions adequately.  The director (level C) came over afterward and thanked me for doing my part at the meeting, which was really surprising.  He’s not a man who gives out positive feedback very often.  So that was nice.

I’ve been wearing makeup to work the last couple of days.  Yesterday, obviously, I had the important meeting.  But I read some articles that said studies show that women in business who wear makeup and skirts are more likely to be respected and advance in their careers than women who don’t.  Also, people who smile a lot are more likely to be trusted.  So, I already like to wear skirts more than pants, so I’m good there.  And I’m pretty good at smiling a lot.  So I’ve started wearing a little makeup, not because I feel like my face needs it but because it’s a tool to try to get more respect at work.  It’s taking some getting used to.  I’ve got to schedule more time into my prep time in the morning.

One of the things that’s really frustrating me at work right now is the amount of perceived self-importance.  I get really tired of dealing with people who think that they’re more important than anyone else around them or that their little piece of paper is more important than whatever else I’m working on right now.  I understand that I’m a small duck on the totem pole, but I’m really tired of hearing the squawking from the rest of the puffed up geese around here.

Justin and I have been playing a video game together that’s got a lot of “go out into the woods and find these items” or “go out into the woods and kill these birds” and stuff like that.  It’s a lot of fun!  My brain is a strange place, though.  Driving into work this morning, I saw a bird land on a wire and thought “What kind of bird is that?  Is that one I need for that quest?  Target the bird to see what kind of bird that is.  Tab.  Click.  Wait, I can’t actually do that!  Dang it!”

Happy birthday, Tim!  I know he doesn’t read my blog, but let him know that I remembered, Erica?  He probably doesn’t care, but I wish him a happy birthday anyway.

I tried my first pistachio on Tuesday.  It was yummy!  Very salty, even though the sodium count wasn’t too bad.  I had a handful of them and enjoyed them.  So I threw some in my lunch bag yesterday for snacking on during the day.  When I went to eat them, I got through 4 of them before my throat started itching and swelling up.  It’s so annoying.  I took a children’s strength allergy medication and felt fine a little while later.

On a slightly related note, if anyone knows where I can get Emerald’s Sweet and Salty Dark Chocolate and Peanut Butter mixed nuts for cheap, let me know.  I have a serious addiction to those nuts and, besides the addiction, they haven’t effected me poorly at all.

I’m also really enjoying sugar free Peppermint Patties.

If you don’t hear from me again for a couple days, we have plans with friends for most of the Memorial Day weekend.  I expect that our days will be filled and our evenings exhausted.  But I’ll try to post pictures later.

Justin’s already run the backup and it took forever, so in order to reduce his amount of work, I’m not making more stuff for him to back-up (this post will disappear forever after the swap-over) since it’s already been enough of a headache.

As soon as they get us moved over, I’ll be back with posts.

I hope you’re all doing great!

• First day of vacation! Sleeping in!
• And then cleaning the church offices really well
• So long that I go to the chiropractor’s office directly from there instead of going home to shower first
• And then go home to shower and get ready for a party
• And then spend the evening at a party with a bunch of very fun people until very late at night

Saturday:

• Did I mention the late night party?  Sleeping!
• And then poking around the house
• And watching TV
• And basically being very, very lazy

Sunday:

• Up for band practice at 7:30
• Church at 10:15 and it was great!
• Home after church for lunch and cleaning house
• And then off to Savannah to look for Christmas presents
• Followed by Olive Garden to use a gift card
• And Tron in 3D with free tickets

Fantastic way to start my vacation!

And I am going to do a post about Grandma Mic (is that how to spell her name? I’ve never been clear on that) soon.  Things have just been crazy, making it hard for my creative side to think and write.

More news on that soon-ish.  But for right now, I’m going to play with code a little bit.

OH!  HAPPY FATHER’S DAY, DAD!!!  Love you lots!!

I did have a dream last night about bloggers I read, though.  I’m not sure if that’s a sign that I read too many blogs or if I’ve been missing writing on my own.  Or just that I wanted to hang out at a funky restaurant/ice-skating lake with a whole bunch of women and one of their kids.

My subconscious is a strange place.

At least I’m not dreaming about Excel macros anymore.  I’ve been doing so much work on macros at work that I went to sleep and dreamed about working on them some more.  Talk about frustrating.  I couldn’t get them to work even while dreaming!  I found someone willing to help me at work, though, so now I think I’ve reached completion on my many macros.

THIS IS ALL ABOUT MACROS, WHICH IS BORING TO MOST PEOPLE.  IF YOU’RE NOT INTERESTED, SKIP AHEAD UNTIL YOU SEE THE “ALL CLEAR”

It started out simple enough.  I wanted an index in the front of a workbook.  The workbook had worksheets for each project, each needing a specific type of paperwork completed, each worksheet keeping the numbers used to identify those document organized neatly.  But it was turning into an enormous workbook.  So I wanted something that would look at all the worksheet names and make an index in the first page of the book.  I ended up with a macro that puts the tabs in alphanumerical order, makes an index looking at those names, and then creates a hyperlink to those pages so there’s no need to sort through the sheets to find the right one.  It’s the coolest thing ever.  I snagged part of it directly from the internet and had my coworker help me get other parts working, but I think I learned a lot about how macros work and put in a good deal of my own effort.

Of course, it looks like that worksheet is going to be obsolete by the beginning of November.  But until then, it’s fantastic!

And then I started working on macros that I’d developed in another workbook that was giving me troubles.  It was set up so that at the check of a box, the date the box was checked would show up with a comment, that information would be added to another sheet in the workbook, and then the date would show up in another workbook altogether.  It’s a nifty piece of work, but it was clunky.  The date in the other workbook shows up on a grid depending on who checked the box (they have their own tabs in the workbook) and which project it was for.  For each sheet in the book, for each checkbox, I had to identify exactly which cell the date should go into.  It was a total of 8 different cells and I had to set it by hand for each workbook, of which there’s one for each project.

It was driving me crazy.

Now, not only does the date and comment show up next to the checkbox, an email opens up to let people know that the box has been checked, and a note shows up underneath the last line of text in a specific column (no matter if there are spaces between cells with text on the page).  The list of information that was being added to another sheet in the workbook was removed because it wasn’t necessary.

AND the date that shows up on the grid finds its way automatically to the correct spot!!  The only thing I have to do is change the file name for each new project, which I already had to do, and put the project number on the first page of the sheet, which, also, I already had to do.

And, unseen by all my users, the code behind it all is about 75% smaller than it was in the first place.  It’s AWESOME.

Again, I had a lot of help from my coworker, but I did most of this on my own, and some of what I was doing was something he hadn’t seen before or considered doing.  I’m using “Find” instead of “Loop” and he’d never seen that before, apparently.

I am very proud of myself.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last several days.  The computer systems were completely off-line Thursday and Friday.  A cooler leaked onto the server and the whole thing went down.  It was oodles of fun, let me tell you.  No clock-in clock, no email, no drives on the network, most intranet functions were down.  I had a few meeting and we sat around chatting and brainstorming, but not able to actually accomplish anything.

So I worked on macros.  I’m such a geek.

ALL CLEAR!

In other news, Justin found out yesterday morning that his family’s dog died Sunday evening from a heart attack.  It was a Bichon Friese named Smidge and he was awesome.  Friendly and smart and loyal.  He looked like a polar bear teddy bear.  He thought Justin was his brother.  They’d had the dog for about 8 years.  We’re all sad about it.

I spent time yesterday looking at adopting a Bichon.  When we do get a dog, that’s the kind we’d like to get because it wouldn’t bother our allergies.  Plus, they’re just fun, adorable little dogs.  It turns out there’s a place that has about 100 rescued Bichons and Bichon-mixes, according to their PetFinder listings.  Unfortunately, they’re in Oklahoma.  And we’re not ready to get a dog just yet.  Even though it would be really nice.

The biopsy on the mole on my arm came back normal.  The cut there is healing slowly.  I finally picked up bandages that fit and stick.  It’s good because the butterfly bandages I was using to keep the small stripe-shaped bandages to stay in place left me with rash.  The bug bite appears to be clearing up with the use of the ointment the dermatologist gave me.  And the jury is still out on the fungal infection.  It seems to be clearing up, but I always think that.  And then it’s not actually gone when I finish the length of the treatment.  Yeah—this is the 3rd or 4th time I’ve tried to get rid of this thing.  I’ve had it for a while.  It’s a good thing it just looks like dry skin.

We rearranged my office over the weekend.  We even got pictures up on the wall!  After a year of living in this place, I finally have pictures in my office.  It’s a good feeling.  I love sitting in there, reading, listening to music.  It’s a very comfortable place.  Now I just have to figure out what to do with all the books still sitting on the floor of Justin’s office instead of in my closet.

And then we’ll figure out how to do Justin’s office and get pictures hung in there, too.

Eventually . . . .

As long as it doesn’t cost us any money because we’re still trying to buy Justin a car.  Yeah, still haven’t finished that one yet.  Does it seem like it’s been a while?  That’s because it has.

And we’re still making sure that we keep enough money in the savings account to pay for tickets for Christmas.  Of course, we could just put them on the credit card, but we finally have everything all on ONE credit card.  You have no idea how great I feel about that one. 

We started out with three maxed-out credit cards.  We finally got one totally paid off, and got the others low enough that I could transfer the balance of the one with higher interest onto the low-interest rate card.  And there was no fee to transfer it over!  That card is now just about maxed again, but we have a singular credit card bill to pay and that is more of a relief than I expected it to be.  And if we can keep up with payments like I’ve been putting into that gaping hole of a money drain, then I expect we’ll have it paid off sometime in the next year.

But getting back to Christmas!  I’ve already been looking at tickets and trying to figure out exactly when I (or we) will fly into town, how long I (we) will stay and who I’d like to see while I’m in town.  I figured out how I’m doing presents.  I’ll buy them here or have them shipped here, wrap them, and then ship them all together in a box to someone up north.  That way, we don’t have to travel with gifts or buy them when we get there, and then wrap them when we get there.  We can take care of all of that while down here, and then just send one heavily insured box up north to wait for us.

Now I just need to know who we need to buy presents for and what they want.

Hint.  Heavy, stinkin’ hint.

Yeah, I know it’s August.  I’m just a little excited!

And rambling, apparently, because I just hit the bottom of page 3 in this Word document.  I did say that there’s been a lot of things on my mind.  I’ll wrap it up here for today, though.  Enough babbling.  There’ll be more time for more thoughts tomorrow.

I could write about my weekend, which was mostly fantastically dull and involved watching movies and sleeping and talking with wonderful people on the phone.

Or I could talk about work and how we’re going to attempt an “affinity diagram” tomorrow and I have never done it before and I really hope it works out well.

I could talk about how we’re flying to Burlington, Vermont, again because we’re going for a wedding.  And I keep freaking out because Justin’s jacket is wrinkled and we haven’t gotten it dry cleaned yet.  And we don’t have a rental car yet, and since we’re staying at Justin’s folks’ place, we need a car to get from there to the wedding and all that.  And all these things about weddings keep stressing me the heck out so much that I haven’t even started thinking about freaking out about the traveling part of the whole deal.

I could talk about these books I’m reading about managing money and not undervaluing your worth and taking control of your finances and all the fun and exciting things I’m learning . . . that no one else thinks are fun and exciting at all.  And I’m reading books about marketing and writing business plans and don’t those sound fascinating, too?  No?  They do to me!

I could write about how well we ended up with our finances last month–with Justin making more money than expected and us handling budgeting and saving really well and ending up so far into the black that it’s astonishing how much we could potentially put away if we spent every month not going out to dinner or spending money on fun things and sitting at home sitting on our thumbs.  Which we’re not going to do but we might spend more time looking at the possiblities there.

Which would bring me into talking about our current situation with Justin’s car.

And dang it!  I haven’t bought gifts for Erica or Dad, who both have birthdays in the next 10 days, or for the bride and groom on Saturday.

So what I’m getting at here is that I really have so much going on in my head right now that it’s completely overwhelming and while I’m really having fun with most of it (car stuff = not so much fun, and what the heck is up with my wedding anxiety when I’m not even involved!), I have no idea where to start with the discussing of it all.

But I hope that you’re all doing very well and having a better start to your week than I did (there were ants in my cereal!) and I will babble nonsense at you all again soon.

Cheers!

I am absolutely tickled about my music, though.  I haven’t been keeping care of that because I don’t usually listen to music on my home computer.  I have a music box that I carry with me and I listen to music on that.  But I realized that there’s a lot of music in my collection that wasn’t making it on to the box.  Part of that problem, I realized, was because the music wasn’t on my computer to start with.  And another part of that problem was that the files were saved in a format that didn’t work with my portable.

So I found a converter that works really well.  And I’ve been copying files from CDs onto my harddrive.  And then I’ve been going through and fixing the file names and making sure everything looks right and is organized right.  And then finding more music that I could add.  And fixing those names and reorganizing.

And syncing the one to the other again and again and again because something is always just a little bit off.  And for some reason 290-some songs always think that the ones on the music box are different from the ones on my computer even though I can’t see a single thing that would be different between the two.  They’re the same files!  Silly electronic devices, talk with each other nicely!

But I’m proud of the converter program that I was able to find. I got it from C-Net’s download page, which I figured was one of the most secure places to get downloads.  And it’s this great, simple little program that does exactly what I want it to do–take the files, make them into mp3s and put them back in the same spot.  Ding!  Done.

I’m also proud of how, with the programs I downloaded, because I downloaded two of them and then deleted the weird one that didn’t work, I was able to remove the faulty program and then fix my system menu to remove the extra shortcuts and programs that both programs installed on my system and get everything exactly like I wanted it to be set.  I can be computer savvy!   It’s great.

I can also be obsessive.  I’ve been working on this music thing since Sunday.  Hours and hours of converting files, renaming files, refiling files, and then syncing them with my music box.

Oh!  And then let’s talk about podcasts!

Or not.

Because I have 200 Escape Pod podcasts and a couple hundred other files for Pod Castle and I Should Be Writing and PodRunner and 5 different Podiobooks.com subscriptions and the 7am NPR News Summary.  And they won’t all fit on my music box.  And I want to have some of them upload automatically when they update and only have 5-10 of the others on my music box at a time because I’m still going through the archives.  And if I can get the 290-some files to stop making faces at themselves, then I can get my music box to automatically sync each time I plug it in and have a rotating podcast library that I can carry with me and not overwhelm the file size.

And it’s been taking me forever.

And Justin keeps laughing at me when he sees that I’m still working on the same project.

But the files!  They must be organized!  And they are!  And it’s at 30% of the sync and then I’ll be able to look at how well it actually turned out this time!

I really hope this is the last time.

And I thought an online calendar would be just useless.

Lately, though, I’ve been giving it a new look.  The two online list makers that I found I liked previously were Ta Da Lists and Remember the Milk.  They’re about as different from each other as apples and tomatoes.  Sure, they’re both technically fruit, both round, and come in similar colors, but that’s about as far as the similarities go.

Ta Da is straight lists.  Write down your item, write down another one, keep on going until you’ve got everything written on your list that you’d like.  You can go back and rearrange them in different orders by dragging them around.  And that’s pretty much the extent of it.  No frills, nothing complicated, just straight lists.

Remember the Milk (RTM) takes list-making to a level us organizing freaks dream about.  You write down your item, you say when it’s due, if it repeats, how long it will take, where it’s taking place (which links to a Google map), tag it with key words that help you keep track of it, add a url address if you need, and give it a priority rating of 1, 2 or 3.  If something didn’t get done, you can postpone it and it will keep track of how many times it’s been postponed.

You can sort the list by anything included in that item—by tags, by due dates, by words anywhere in the item, by locations, by time, anything you’ve included in the item, you can sort by.  And you can make a short list from your long list by those sorting options and add a tab that keeps that information easily available.

Then, you can take your list and you can import it to a calendar online.

And that’s just what I figured out while playing around with it for a couple hours last night.  And part of that time was figuring out how the heck to make the RTM list play nice with a calendar.  For a while, I played with Google Calendar; since I’ve got my RSS feeds going into the Google Reader, it seemed like a good fit.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get them to talk with one another, so I went with 30 Boxes instead.  At first glance, it’s not all that impressive.  It’s not as pretty, it seems a little clunky.  But it’s got hidden depths that make me giggle.

For example, you can put in someone’s birthday and it’ll ask if it repeats every year, if you want a reminder the day before, and, catch this, what year they were born.  It will then add that onto your calendar with a little note that says how old that person is on their birthday.  You can change the color of events, make events repeat, all the basic things for calendars.  You can share it with buddies, add it to your webpage, and customize the look of the calendar.  I haven’t worked out how that last one works yet, but I’m hoping to get there eventually.  Plus, it gives you the option to include a basic 5-day weather forecast and Twitter updates.

And it had a really easy spot, once I found it, where I put in the address for my to do list calendar information and it just plopped it onto my calendar for me.  And it gives me the option to keep that information private.  I’m still checking to make sure that what it says is private is honestly, truthfully staying private, but I just have to find someone to check it out for me and then I’ll be good to go!

I like Ta Da lists for some things, a very small list of things, that work better in that format than on RTM.  For example, lists of movies that I would like to watch eventually.  It would just clutter up my to do list having a list like that included.  That said, I’ve got a queue on Netflix that holds that information.  I have a list of books to read, but my Goodreads account also has that information.  So it’s good for just straight lists of items you want to keep track of, but it’s possible that you’ve already got that information stored somewhere else.

Justin actually mentioned Remember the Milk when we were exploring replacing my phone and all the gadgets I’d like to have there.  I really would like to have a PDA and the option that we’re looking at is to get me an iPod Touch (eventually—certainly not any time soon).  Apparently RTM works very nicely with the Touch.  And with all the bells and whistles attached, it’s very exciting.  Lately, I’ve found myself writing things on sticky notes to take home to add to my to do list at home.  Having the list online, while it takes away from the option of carrying my list around with me (which is where the PDA comes in), makes it very easy for me to add things while I’m away from home.

And the online calendar, I actually wanted to get set up for my professional organizing business.  I’m going to have to keep track of when I’m not available to work with people, and I think it might be helpful to have that information available for other people when they’re requesting my time.  Since I can make things private, I can put items like “Working with Stephanie 12:30 to 3:30” on my privately seen list and put “Unavailable from 12:30 to 3:30” on the calendar for everybody else to see.  I’ll see duplicates, but maybe I can find a work-around when I figure out how to customize the thing.

All in all, it’s an organizing geek’s happy place.  My lists:  organized any way I want them, available to me with a click of a mouse, from any computer with internet access.  And a calendar to help me keep track of it all.  It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.

EDIT:  I think I’ve got the calendar so it shows other people only what I want it to show them.  Hopefully.  I’ve added a page under the top menu called, of all things, “Calendar.”  In there is a link to the calendar.  Let me know what you think?