Shrine interior
Posted: May 17th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: photos | No Comments »
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posted by Instagrate to WordPress
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:
(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.