I'm tired of these discussions

Another discussion with Duv about what he plans to do concerning his two major choices right now: his health and money investments.

 

There are two things about him that I believe to be true, and that he has agreed with.  One, because of his spending more than a decade living off of the grid, spending weeks to maybe a small handful of months in one place, he has grown used to having to make quick decisions.  I believe that has been the main consternation he has had these last few weeks in deciding what to do with his money from the car accident.  He’s actually had the ‘luxury’ of taking time to decide and it’s very foreign to him.  I described it to him as he has spent so much time being Kirk, flying by the seat of his pants, and now, with the last seven years, he’s now in the position of Pecard, thinking things through over and over.  Even though he’s more of the latter (IMO), he’s spent so much time being the former that taking the extra time feels pretty foreign to him.  The second is that because he spent so much time off of the grid, where others learn to live by the constraints of day-to-day, 9-to-5 living, he has never conformed to it.  So, when I ask him to pick a date when he will take the tests, it seems to go against his nature.  Instead of saying that he will take the test on such-and-such a date, and doing everything he needs to to make sure that he is good to take his tests on that date, he would rather bide his time and take things slowly (the no constraints part I mentioned), and then whenever he’s ‘feeling it’ is when it happens.  I believe that he is also avoiding this test, even though this first one will be far easier on him, since we only want to gauge how he is doing on the regime that he has set up for himself.  If he’s hemming and hawing now, what is he going to do when, a year or so from now, he sets the appointment at the stem cell clinic and he has to stop everything that he does to keep himself going to take that set of tests?

 

Am I just too impatient?  Or is what I’m asking of him reasonable?

 

This coming week

Good Day Today

Yesterday was a good day

I did pretty good yesterday.  For once, the work that I should be doing came out on top.  On my ManicTime Statistics chart, the combination of Personal Communications (mainframe connection) and WinOrganizer (project notes) added up to well over 4 hours, half the day.  For me, that’s good.

Not quite so bad

This is the second weekend in a row that I got a planned project completed.  Last weekend, I created some hanging bags to put my scrunchy blouses in, so that I can keep them stored among my other hanging items, since I tended to not think about wearing them when they were stored in containers on a shelf.  This week, I made two shrugs to wear at work.

 

I didn't get any work done like I wanted to.  I also did not get any C# studying done, either.

 

New game plan, once again (part 2)

I’ve also run up the minimum due on the Military Star up again.  I’m going to sacrifice the money that I had set aside to cover my dance classes for the remainder of the year, putting it towards the balance.  If I want to take those classes after the 6 weeks that I’ve already paid for, I’ll have to set aside some of the very little money that I have left each paycheck.  I had hoped to be ahead this year when it came to my classes, but I’ll now be back to barely on-time, as usual.  I still have a couple more things to clear up, namely the eBay items that I never paid for.  My account has been suspended.  I don’t want to start over, yet again.  It’s bad enough that this one is attached to my work email and not my home one, since I’ve already messed up the eBay two times before.  I’m also going to get a small loan at the credit union, $300-$500.  That will be the very last of the little amount that I had for spending, until it is paid off.

 

New game plan, once again

An argument with Duv this past weekend has brought about yet another change in my game plan.  I never did tell him about my bad PGW score.  He was not a happy camper.  He’s now worried that I might lose my job.  He had asked that I remove as many distractions away from work that I could.

 

So, here’s the new game plan:

·         I had wanted to get a 4^th, smaller iPod, since my largest genre had grown past the device that it was on.  Last night, I removed most of the videos on device #1 and moved the pop/rock genre onto it.  (I can’t put too much more on it, since there is only 18GB left.).  I’m left with some favorite commercials that I have saved (I love the Hershey’s Kisses commercials from about a decade ago), some music videos and some animated movies that I’ve seen so many times and know so well that I don’t even have to watch it; the track sort of becomes a very pleasant droning, somewhat.

·         I’ve moved my study time to 5pm, instead of during lunch.  This way, I can go with the guys to lunch, and not have to worry about not getting any studying done while I’m down there. 

·         I will not take out my netbook until 5pm.  I have set up hourly reminders to remind me to stop any time-wasters that I might be doing.

·         I’m searching for the Temptation Blocker software that I used to have installed on my work PC, to keep me from perusing Internet sites.  The newest version of the websense software we have installed still can’t block particular things for particular people.  Instead, it would be block everyone and set up exceptions.  Temptation Blocker allowed a person to set up sites that they could avoid trying to go to.  However, that person could override that decision, by keying in a very long randomly generated password.  I think that it also kept you from getting to the Task Manager, to just kill T.B., and I think that was why I took it off, since there are occasions where I needed to get to the Task Manager to kill a messed up process.

 

At the same time:

·         I have gone back to using my pseudo whiteboards in my office.  I have one marked with items due this and next week, and this and next month.  Another is marked with what is due today and tomorrow, and today’s #1.  After going without using it for some time, I’ve found that it really did help to be able to actually see it up somewhere.  A task list or calendar doesn’t show you all of it all of the time.

·         I have reinstalled Evernote again onto my work PC.  I had used it some years ago to capture all kinds of data, instead to taking a note here, scribbling a list there, etc.  Some years back, after a conversation with Don, I decided to try Microsoft OneNote instead.  That is the crappiest capturer that I have ever come across.  Evernote now has a mobile version and also keeps it data in  the clouds, meaning that any of my devices can connect to the same repository.  It now makes more sense to use it again.  I can capture on my phone and access it later from any of my PCs that have it installed, which will soon be all of them.  If it had alarms, it would be nearly perfect.

·         I’m condensing the apps on my phone, and at work.  I’m putting as much into Google as I can, since I can also access those via PC or phone.  I find that I’m still doubled up in a few spots, such as notebook apps.  Evernote allows you to combine notebooks into a group, however it has no reminder or alarms.  I could create a list in it, such as a task list but I can’t set a reminder for those tasks.  So, it’s either Google Tasks or another app I found.  The latter one lets the built list for the day display on my phone dashboard area, so that I can access it before the said alarm goes off, which is nice.  I have a project app at work that I’ve been very happy with for the last couple of years.  I can set numerous alarms on any given task or note within in, which is very, very nice.  If Outlook allowed this, I would still be using it to keep my work projects.

 

And another thing:

·         JoAnn’s group had always been big on using the forward planning that Bill McKenna had set up some years ago.  David had dropped using it, mostly because we weren’t hitting all of our meetings.  Scott is continuing the use of it.  Now that it’s in use and we are being diligent about using it, I really like it.  I believe that Scott prefers that we work the items in the order of the list, whenever possible.  That one-at-a-time process will help considerably.

 

Why, oh why, do I do this?

     

 

This is a reminder that I have.  I have it set up so that I can spend an amount of time cleaning out my inbox.  Most of the time, I ignore it.  On the rare occasion that I do actually take the time to do this, I don’t usually set the timer.  For whatever reason, I did today.  After 5 minutes of sorting through my overloaded inbox – it’s been a few weeks since I have cleared out anything – I found that, as usual, I did not want to stop.  I had to almost force myself to stop and move on to something else.  That hyper focusing can really drive me up the wall at times.

 

How did today go?

Let's see, what happened today?

• I had planned on getting the conversion project finished today, since I only had 4 scripts left.  I spent over 3 hours total searching for software that I could have searched for later;
• last week, I only got chapter 2 of my C# book read.  I never did do the final projects in that chapter, although I still want to do them; I have not started reading chapter 3 for that very reason.  I got to spend a lot of time reading while I was helping out at my mother's garage sale this past Saturday.  That gave me an idea: I should read the chapter first, then go back and do the projects, since I think that interrupting myself doesn't help me any;
• Duv and I got into an argument again, after he saw the latest Military Star account and saw how much that I have added to the balance.  Nothing seems to deter me when I am ready to buy something.  I can say that I have thoughts such as 'he won't like this', but that is not enough to deter me from doing what my impulses have already started.  Weird.  And since I'm the one that controls that card, I'm can't put anything in place to stop myself from walking all over myself to get whatever it is I want at that particular moment.  I'm going to have so sacrifice some of the money that I had set aside to pay for dance classes for the rest of the year to catch it up, since that is all of the loan that is left.  Since I had already spent a chunk of money on books for the subjects that I wanted to learn for work, I put the money that I had set aside for one of the course curriculums at the online classes to another use as well.  And not much was spent on frivolous things this time, so I can't even put the loss of the loan amount to that.  For the last few years, this has how we have gotten the extra things we needed but didn't have the extra money for.  I will have to manage dance classes another way, setting aside a bit each paycheck.  That didn't work out so well the last time I did that.  In fact, it never really has; about half of the times that I've had to stop going to classes the entire time I've taken classes has been for the reason that I didn't have the extra money to do it.

Am I ever gonna improve upon the way that I do things?

 

So far today, ...

                … and yesterday, I’ve listened to more music, and watched less video.  I haven’t even watched ‘Wall-E’ yet, lol.  I’ve been humming tunes from ‘The Voice’ for days, most especially the coaches – Christina Aguliera, Adam Levine (Maroon 5), Ce Lo Green, Blake Sheldon – cover of Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’.  Love it, love it, love it!

 

Thanks ….

 

Monica Collins

Appl Sys Prog Analyst I

Information Technology Directorate

Army & Air Force Exchange Service

214-312-2353 

collinsm@aafes.com

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