• Get off work promptly at 11:30 and not a minute longer. Done!
  • Finish my late project as much as possible before I leave. Done!  Yea!  Now to wait for edits back.
• Find out if S. would like to meet for lunch. Nope.  She’s not free today.
• Pick up sis-in-law from school. Done!
  
• Go home so she can do laundry. She’s working on it.
  
• Go to the church offices and clean them. Done!
  • Finish painting the frame around the white-board while I’m at it. Nope.  Only so many hours in a day.
• Go home and shower. I’m clean!
  • OR Go home and plant flowers. Oh, heck no.
• Head back into town to hit Target (with sis-in-law if she’s interested) Of course she is!  It’s TARGET.
  • Pick up calcium supplements, shoes for the donations at church, a tiny bit of Easter candy
• Take sis-in-law back to school after she’s finished her laundry or at 6:30, whichever comes first.
• Collapse for the evening because even if it’s not that long of a list, there’s a lot of work involved.

Of course, right now my stomach feels like it’s been given a swift kick and I don’t feel very well at all.  I don’t know what’s causing it but I really hope it ends soon.

Time to go sip some water and get some more work done.

So, that said, here’s my list for this coming year:

30 things to do before I’m 31

Random
1. Get a dog
2. Steam clean the carpets
3. Organize my photos better
4. Make the back porch a nicer place to sit
5. Put together our wedding album
6. Read one book per month

Body
7. End the year weighing less than I did when I started it (I’m getting smarter!)
8. Learn how to braid my own hair
9. Don’t get pregnant

People
10. Talk/email Mom at least once a week, preferably more
11. Talk/email Dad at least once a month, preferably more
12. See family for Thanksgiving (maybe?)
13. See family for Christmas
14. Write letters to grandmas

Travel
15. Explore a brown sign, museum, park, or cemetary each month
16. Go to the Barnett family reunion
17. Go to Luke and Krista’s wedding
18. Go to the Biltmore in Asheville, NC
19. Go to the place with the turtles
20. Go to the Ren Faire
21. Go for a walk on the beach at sunrise

Money
22. Make significant progress on the car loan
23. Save up money for a new TV
24. Save up money for that chaise lounge
25. Save up money for a new camera
26. Save up money for the bedroom remodel (new mattress, armoire, matching bed-tables, new bedding, matching valences, blanket rack, trunk at the foot, new TV)

Work
27. Finish my estate book and example
28. Finish my hurricane evacuation plan
29. Stop having breakfast at work
30. Go to the department Christmas party

5:25 – Wake up, look at the alarm, and realize that I have 30 minutes more I could be sleeping.

5:55 – Hit the snooze button.

6:00 – Hit the snooze button again.

6:03 – Get out of bed before it goes off again.  Ugh.

6:15 – Get out of the shower and start to get ready.  Change clothes two times.  Go downstairs and make my lunch.  Go back upstairs and change clothes again.

6:45 – Kiss Justin good-bye and head out the door.

7:15 – Park my car.

7:25 – Get to my desk and log into the computer.

7:30 – 8:00 – Make and eat my oatmeal while checking my email and scanning documents into the computer that were left from yesterday.

8:00 – 9:00 – Alternate between trying to figure out how to get my macro to work right and doing other projects people ask me to do.

9:00 – 10:00 – Go to a meeting about the changes coming into the system for how we approve documentation.  It’s a very boring meeting.

10:00 – 10:30 – Go back to trying to figure out my macro.

10:30 – 11:00 – Help a coworker try to embed an Excel table into a Word document.  Fail.

11:00 – Run to the other side of the building to talk with my Lean adviser about my project and other Lean stuff.

11:30 – Eat lunch and read a book at my desk.

12:00 – Call Justin and a few other people.

1:00 – 2:00 – Think about what my Lean adviser said and work on my macro and work on things people give me.

2:00 – Lead a Lean meeting about schedules.  It’s a short one just to let everybody know where I think we’re heading.  One of the people I really need to be there is out today.

2:15 – Walk through the demo cabin of the new project.  It’s beautiful!  Follow a coworker as she takes me through another hanger onto another airplane that they’re finishing up the details on.  I’ve been at the company for 3 years and I finally got to step foot onto one of our airplanes!!

3:00 -5:00 – Work on the Excel table crossover into Word problem.  Get it so it works on my computer, but it doesn’t when anyone else opens it on their own computer.  Work on other things people hand me to do.  Get utterly frustrated at Word.

5:00 – 6:00 – Really buckle down and try to work out this macro thing.  I think I need to set objects and collections and create a loop.  Maybe.  How do I do that?

6:00 – Leave work.

6:45 – Get home, change quickly, and walk out the door to meet Justin walking home from the grocery store.

7:00 – Walk Justin home and go out to finish my walk.  Get home, shower, clean house.

8:30 – Start to make dinner with Justin.

9:00 – Eat dinner and clean the kitchen.  Go back upstairs.  Read comics and blogs and listen to Do You Want to Date My Avatar two more times.

10:30 – Write this.  And go to bed.

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!

Today:
I got up and went babysitting earlier than I expected, but it was only for an 11-month old and he slept the entire time I was there.

Yesterday:
I worked with the children’s pastor on the store room at the church office and made it go from total chaotic eyesore to a shining example of organization.  Everyone is very pleased.

And then after grilling dinner and chatting with friends online, we drove Justin’s car to the mechanic’s while no one else was on the road.

Wednesday:
Relaxed, did some projects, made lots of phone calls about business license information and finding a mechanic.  Babysat in the evening for a few hours for a house of sleeping children.

Tuesday:
Drove to Macon with my small group leader/friend with her 11-month old, 3-year old, and 9-year old to drop the oldest off with her grandparents and then drove home again.

Monday:
Babysat for several hours for those same kids (I’ve seen a lot of them this week).  I swear I did something else on Monday but I have no idea what it was.

So, my last week of my vacation has been insane.  I made a chunk of change (gifted, if the unemployment office asks) to help with possible fixes for Justin’s car.

He’s been driving my car most of this month because I have a/c and get better mileage.  But also, for the last week and a half, because his brakes went out.  The mechanic looked at it today and didn’t have good news for us.  We’re going to chat about it tonight and go see the mechanic tomorrow morning.

And I didn’t do everything I’d hoped to do while I was off work, but I did have fun doing what I did and it doesn’t matter that I didn’t cross everything off my list.

Bills are coming due in the next couple weeks and if we managed to make it through this whole month without pulling from savings for anything other than paying for our plane tickets for next month’s wedding, then I’m a tickled lady.  We’ll know for sure in two more weeks.

I’ve made some good progress on my small business, learned a lot about the paperwork and how much more I really need to learn.

I learned a lot about IRAs and different money and retirement things.

I’ve slept in later most mornings that I should have but I don’t regret it one bit.

It’s been a nice break, but I’m ready to get back to work again.

After the weekend.

So, the weekend really wasn’t much to speak of.  I spent most of it being luxuriously lazy.  Serious slothfulness.  It was fantastic.  I read a book, I played games with Justin.  I played games with friends online.  It was really a very relaxing weekend.

Meaning I woke up this morning with a need to redeem the “lost” time over the weekend.

I got up, poked at my computer reading comics, and then got dressed and went out to mow the lawn.  Did you know I use a reel mower?  I love my mower.  Usually, since we moved into a place with a lawn, Justin snatches up the lawn chores as one of his things.  A husband project.  But since I’m home this month and it’s stupidly hot, I’ve been getting up in the morning on weekdays and taking care of the lawn.  It’s hot, sticky work, but I love the snip-snip-snip sound of my mower and the work of the whole thing and the beautiful look of the lawn once it’s done.

So I did yard work for a while and then went for a walk around the pool to get a little straight-forward exercise in while it was still not terribly hot.

After getting cleaned up, I tidied the house, took care of a few projects, made some phone calls.  I kept a list of what I did today.  It started out as a list of things to do, and then ended up adding things that I’d done that weren’t on the original list just so I could see what I’d done.

This is what I ended up with:

DONE:

• Mow the lawn
• Weed whack, rake, and spray weeds
• Go for a walk
• Call the dentist to confirm my appointment
• Call the town office about the extra trash can
• Tidy the house
• Make rice pudding (slow-cooker)
• Clean the fridge
• Put the boxes in the attic
• Cancel the protection plan on the credit card
• Take a break
• Call Julie to apologize for missing last night (leave a message)
• Email Kim to confirm our Wednesday appointment
• Fold the clothes in my dresser drawers
• Order tickets for the wedding in August
• Go to the dentist at 4:00
• Stop at the grocery store for a few things
• Talk with Julie
• Finish the movie I was watching while folding
• Talk with Justin about car stuff
• Start the grill to do the corn
• Write a post

TO DO:

• Read the “Publications” page on the business license page
• Make a hurricane evacuation plan
• Figure out the IRA information
• Clean up MyMusic folder on my computer
• Think of recycling sorting ideas
• Set up the carbon monoxide alarm
• Get the notes from the Orman book
• Read the paperwork book for organizing
• Talk with Audrey about the seamstress
• Clip fingernails
• Take a bath

I think I might still finish those last two, but the others are just going to have to wait until tomorrow.

Right now I’m grilling corn on the cob, in husks, on our little portable grill.  It’s only big enough to fit a few things at a time, but it’s just the two of us, so that works out perfectly.  We picked it up a few weeks ago and we’ve used it probably one or two times each week since then.  I love it!  This is our second time trying corn.  The first time turned out so amazing, we had to find out if it was just a fluke or if they’re always that good.  I’m using questionable corn today, which might be detrimental to the experiment.  But if turns out good, we’ll know that it’s just that amazing to grill corn in husks.

And then we’ll have the rice pudding that I did this afternoon and probably should have added more milk when it was all gone in 1/2 the time the recipe said it should, but hopefully will be yummy anyway.

And then I’m going to relax my evening away!

I hope you all had a fantastic Monday!  I’ll see you again tomorrow!

I wish I had rain boots.  I was wet up to my knees by the time I made it to my desk.

I did get to use my umbrella, though.  So many people use such drab-colored umbrellas, black and navy and they’re all so dark.  My umbrella is white with multi-colored polka-dots.  I love it.

In other news, I got to my desk and realized that my shirt was on inside out.  This, apparently, is what happens when I try to make last-minute wardrobe changes in my rain-darkened bedroom.  So I ducked into an empty cubical with a door and flipped it around.

A coworker and I had another discussion about how I don’t understand why he crosses off the days on the group calendar when we haven’t finished them yet.  He does this all the time and it drives me nuts.  Sometimes he’ll not only cross off today, but also the next couple of days, too.  He’s already crossed off the first week of the furlough.  He says he’s thinking ahead.  I say that we haven’t finished the day yet.  I’m tempted to steal his marker away, but he’s higher-up than me so I really just need to learn to deal with it.

My shoulders are starting to peel from the sun damage.  Hopefully it’ll stick to the two red stripes that have persisted across my shoulders.  The rest has faded to a dark tan, but these two stripes have stayed red.  And now they’re starting to peel, despite my best moisturizing efforts.

I should write about the trip.

Okay, that’s done.  I’ll post that separately, though, because it’s a huge long thing.  So once you hit the end of this post, keep on scrolling and you’ll read the post about our trip to Vermont.

It’s not raining anymore.  The sun has come out and it’s hot and humid.  Welcome to summer.

I have today, tomorrow, and four days of next week left to work and then I’m off for four weeks.  I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to handle meals over the next month.  The plan is to conserve as much as possible, in both energy and food expenses.  I can cook things in the crock pot and not have any heat seep into the room.  I actually have a lot of options there, from what I read.  And we have the wok for other options, and a toaster oven.  We’re going to look into getting a tiny, cheap little grill for the back porch and that will open up a whole world of options.  Plus, yea!  Grilling!  On a cute little $10 portable.

But what do you all think?  Do you have recommendations on foods that I could make over the furlough?  Length of cook time isn’t a concern—I’ll have all day to work on meals.  But I’m looking for meals that are super cheap and don’t cause a lot of heat in the house (air conditioning is expensive).

Ideas I’ve thought of so far are:

Crock pot:

• Roast chicken
• Chili
• Soup
• Pasta

Wok:

• Stir fry
• Fried rice
• Scrambled eggs

Cold:

• Salads
• Sandwiches/wraps

Grilled:

• Hamburgers
• Hotdogs/brats
• Kabobs
• Baked potatoes
• Chicken
• This thing called “Poor man’s lunch” that I can’t quite remember but I’m going to search until I find it.

Leave me comments with suggestions of other meals I could make!

And keep on reading if you want to read the post about our trip to Vermont.

We’re flying to Vermont tomorrow morning.  Our flight is around 11:30 out of Jacksonville, Florida, so we’re leaving home around 7:30 so we have plenty of time to navigate our way there and check in and navigate our way around the airport.

I don’t like airports.

They’re big and loud and confusing.  There are people everywhere, rushing around, waiting around, running, sitting, talking on cell phones, typing on laptops.  Garbled voices on overhead speakers make announcements from underwater, decrypted only by other employees of the airport, but they’re not telling.  Planes are late, delayed, routed to different gates.  Stone-faced security people run wands over my limbs that beep at the underwire in my bra, they pull everything out of my luggage, they examine the bottoms of my feet.

Flying doesn’t bother me.  Once I get on the airplane, I’m better.  I have a seat, I have my luggage, I’ve accomplished everything I needed to accomplish to complete my part of the deal.  All the other people in the plane have their own seats, have their own business, and we can all sit there, neatly organized in rows and columns, and wait.  There’s no chaos.  No rushing and waiting.  Just sitting and watching the familiar routine of the flight.

And I am getting much better about it.  There was a while there when something would happen to me every single time I went to the airport.  Usually I was pulled aside for extra security checks.  Because a short, blonde chick is apparently a security risk.

This will be my second flight with Justin.  Flying with someone is so much better than flying alone, except I tend to worry about both of us, then, instead of just me.  And if I don’t watch it, I’ll let myself get worked up because I know that he’s there to handle everything.  When I was traveling alone, I had to hold it together because no one else was there to help me.  I very much prefer flying with Justin than flying alone.

So, once we navigate our way to the airport, get to our plane, fly to Vermont, and collect our luggage from the Burlington airport, the next several days will be spent with Justin’s friends, family, and family friends.  There’s the graduation and the parties, rubbing elbows with people I know pretty well, kind of well, and know not at all.  And I know that, really, it’s all going to go perfectly well.  I get along with his friends and his family, and I can mingle with strangers just fine.

I’m just dealing with pre-travel jitters.

My computer is lying in pieces on the floor of my office.  Justin is trying to get something working and it’s not been going very well.  Yesterday, I went into my office and my computer was running in loops—turning on, booting up, starting to load Windows, freaking out, turning off . . . turning on, booting up . . . .  In the end, it should run much better, but it’s going to wait until we get back from our trip.

We have one load of laundry sitting in the dryer and one more load going in today so we have full drawers of clean laundry to choose for our luggage.  The luggage is sitting on my trunk in my office, pulled out from my closet yesterday evening so I could look at carry-on and purse options.  The purse options left me sitting on the bed reorganizing my purse to see if the wallet-insert would work well, while the carry-on bag sat in my office with a magazine and a couple books waiting to be packed.

Today, I have to make sure that everything I need to accomplish gets done before I leave at 6:00.  The biggest project, a document out for review by the guys for the project completion on Tuesday, is out and waiting for comments or signatures of approval.  I have to review a document that’s up for discussion at a meeting I’m going to miss tomorrow and hopefully pass on my comments.  I’m supposed to find information for an article for the department newsletter.  I need to find information about a Lean project I’m chairing so I can get started on that as quickly as possible.  And find out information on an expense report that I need to get submitted.

When I get home, I need to:

• Unload the dishwasher
• Load the dirty dishes
• Water the plants
• Unplug my fountain because it’ll dry up and run on empty and that’s bad
• Fold the laundry in the dryer
• Ask Justin to wash the last load of laundry
• Dry and fold the last load of laundry
• Charge all my electronic devices
• Pack
• Remember to pack Jessi’s card
• Remember to pack the stuff Rose wanted from the attic
• Find a way to print off the directions and travel stuff
• Eat
• Sleep

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?