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!

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!