Shrine interior

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My shrine from yesterday's workshop

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Instagram Image

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In the garden

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U is for unexpected

I am a planner. I make lists for every occasion as well as every day, and I keep a set of calendars. Despite all this, I don’t consider myself to be regimented. I chafe under strict schedules and ironclad routines, but at the same time I find it helpful to put things like “water plants” and “deal with receipts” as weekly recurring items on my to-do list. (Things for Mac, if you’re interested — I cannot recommend it highly enough, and I don’t get paid for doing that.)

The key for me is planning with flexibility, because if there’s one thing I know in this world, it’s that shit happens, and you have to be at least a little prepared for the unexpected.

The unexpected is not necessarily bad. Good unexpected things can be the first truly beautiful spring day, an invitation to join a friend on a day trip, learning that the architectural salvage place you’ve heard about but is only open two days each year is opening tomorrow, and so on.

The unexpected could be what you usually think of, too: migraines, a sick niece whose mom has to work, a funeral to attend, a family crisis, a friend or family member in need, an accident, any number of things.

I have a couple of “rules” (I need a better name for those; time to call Metaphor Mouse) when I schedule my work.

1. I rarely accept work with a deadline such that I have to drop absolutely everything and work on  nothing but that nonstop up to the deadline to get it done well and on time. When I do, it is generally because I have absolutely nothing else going on, or the rush fee is too tempting, or it’s for a favorite client who understands just what she’s asking. 
2. I preview each project and schedule it in chunks, and those chunks are front-loaded. For example, I just did what I call prelims on a short new book project that came in yesterday. It is due a week from today. It has front matter, eight sections, and back matter. I scheduled the FM and sections 1–3 for today, sections 4–6 for tomorrow, and the rest of the book for Friday. This gives me Monday and Tuesday to do the second readthrough and final corrections (which will take only about half a day total). If something comes up that I have to take care of over the next couple of days, I can shift those plans a little bit.
3. I learned the hard way a long time ago to be a pessimist about how much time things will take. I’ve been doing this job for more than twenty years now and have a pretty good handle on things, but I still pad my internal schedules. Any time of that padding I don’t have to use is bonus time that I can use to go do something fun.
4. I almost never pack my schedule completely full. I leave at least one time chunk (a morning or afternoon) free each week so I can catch up on anything that might have taken longer than expected or do things like go to the grocery store or deal with the unexpected.

T is for tea

Tea is my everyday drink. Hot in the mornings and when it’s cool weather; iced the rest of the time. Both of my grandmothers drank tea, and I picked it up from them. Of course, when I was little, I needed four or five spoons of sugar. These days, I take just a bit less than one spoon per cup for black teas, and a half a spoon or so for flowery herbals.

My go-to grocery store tea, the one I have almost every morning, is Tazo Awake. I need a strong black tea to get me going in the morning. I also have teas from Adagio (Yunnan Gold and Assam Melody are particularly good), the local Storehouse Tea (a really nice vanilla), and a bunch of other places. One whole shelf in our kitchen is taken up by our tea collection.

After my fourth cup, in the early afternoon, I switch to decaf. Tazo Honeybush is a favorite, but I also like Stash decaf vanilla honeybush, Constant Comment decaf, and a recent addition, Bigelow Orange and Spice.

I brew my own iced tea out in the sun with plain old Lipton. No idea why, but that tastes the best to me for iced.

I just never developed a taste for coffee. I love the smell of it, and I’ll have a cup every once in a while when I’m in a situation where asking for tea would be a major hassle, but it just doesn’t appeal to me the way tea does.

S is for summer

Summer is my favorite season. I’m a big fan of fresh air and sunshine and warm days, blooming gardens and birdsong and post–8 p.m. sunsets. Summer is particularly glorious and welcomed here in Northeast Ohio after our long and cold winters. (It snowed here Saturday morning. I wish I were kidding.)

I love that my office has views to the outdoors on three sides and two sets of windows I can open when the weather is nice. We get wonderful cross-breezes in our house, and working in my office in the summer is almost like working outside. And I do that, too, when I can.

I try to take summers a little bit easier, workload-wise. It’s such an awful feeling for Labor Day to roll around and to realize that I didn’t make it to the beach or the park as much as I wanted. The past two years, I’ve been making a special effort to not get too overwhelmed with projects during the warm weather months. I’m still not at the right balance, but I’m working on it.

R is for rest

Rest is so important for staying on top of your game and staying sane, and I haven’t been very good about making sure I get enough lately. I sleep well, routinely eight hours a night, but rest is more than just sleep. It’s time to play, to read for pleasure, to take a leisurely walk, to watch the sun set, to sip a cup of tea at a cafe and watch the world go by, to take some photos, to visit with friends.

This year has been a bit crazy, workwise — and I’m glad of it. I love what I do, and I love my clients and doing good work together. I also like watching my bank account grow steadily, which lets me do things like take workshops and go to conferences and order cabinets and, yes, buy a new car. I have other things that I do, too — my jewelry business, and running Cleveland Handmade — and those have been busy as well, if on more of a back burner.

But I’m still working on ways to balance everything I want to do and make rest a steady, regular part of every day, along with exercise and learning new things.

Plums starting to bloom

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Q is for quick

Quick — if you use WordPress on your own website and you have a username “admin,” you’ll want to create a new admin account with a completely different name, then delete that old admin account. Especially if you don’t use strong passwords.

Apparently there have been a number of botnet attacks on sites pairing the username “admin” with random passwords. This actually isn’t new, but a recent attack has an enormous botnet working at it, and the chances of your site getting hacked are higher because of it. Changing your admin login is a simple way to opt yourself out of this attack.

Here’s what to do:

1. Log in to your admin account.
2. Under Users, create a new user with a different name, preferably one that has some caps and numbers in it. Hackers need both a username and a password to attack; by making both hard to guess, you make it that much less likely you’ll be hacked. Also, you’ll have to slug an alternate email address in for that user, since WordPress won’t let you give two users the same email address. You can change this back later.
3. Give that user administrative privileges.
4. Give that user a strong password.
5. Write that username and password down. Better yet, put it in your password manager program (I highly recommend 1Password for Mac users).
6. Log out.
7. Log in under the new username and password.
8. Go to Users and delete the old admin account. It will ask you to assign posts made under that old account to another account. Generally, you want to choose the one you just created.
9. If you care, go to your profile and change the email on the username back to the one you used before.
10. Have fun blogging!

(If you use WordPress.com, you don’t need to worry about this, since you shouldn’t have an account named admin; you blog there under a username unique to the WordPress.com domain.)

I did this yesterday for the seven sites I have that run WordPress and had an admin account, and it took just a couple of minutes per site, once I got the hang of what I was doing. Two of the sites showed a couple of admin accounts that I don’t recall creating (“admin” + a number; I very well might have created them back in the Dark Ages, when I first started using WordPress, though), so I deleted those accounts, too, just to be safe. I went through all of the folders on those sites to check for unusual files and didn’t see anything, so I think I’m good for now. If indeed I didn’t create them, it looks like whoever did was only setting up, not actively doing anything yet.

This weekend I will also start the process of changing passwords on all of my web accounts. Huge PITA, but necessary to do once in a while.