Updating systems

It’s been a light workweek here at Pax Industries, so I finally he some time to do some updates I’ve been wanting to get to for a while. Software was the big one.

I’ve been putting off upgrading to Mac OS X Lion because I first needed to come up with a replacement for Quicken, which has run my financial life for the last 15 years or so. I was never in love with Quicken, but it did what I needed it to do and I was used to it. There aren’t a lot of options out there in the Mac world; iBank is probably the best known, but one of the helpful trainers at the Apple Store gave me some pointers to some others, including Moneywell and SEE Finance.

In the end, I went with iBank, mainly because it has some history behind it and doesn’t appear to be likely to go away anytime soon. The import of my Quicken data went shockingly well. I was a little worried, having read a few reports of things getting hinky there, but my fears were allayed. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I think it will be a fine replacement once I get used to its quirks. So far I’m finding it irritating that I can’t use the plus and minus keys to change the date and that opening an account doesn’t automatically open a new transaction. But I think it will be fine once I break some decade-plus-old habits. I’m also not excited about the cartoony interface with its ugly, oversized icons. Here’s hoping those will mature as the program matures.

With the path clear for Lion, I bit the bullet and started the download. It was taking a while — Apple’s servers have apparently taken a hit this week with all the iOS 5 upgrades — so I left it overnight and installed in the morning. I haven’t had any glitches thus far, just having to do a few tweaks. There are some new things here, but most of it seems to be hidden, so I have a book and hope to sneak into an Apple Store workshop tomorrow to see what’s what. In the meantime, programs are working as usual, so I was able to pick up quickly when a last-minute project came in just as I was finishing my upgrades.

Along with the software I put in place a couple of new procedures for handling email and projects, which I’ll talk about another time.

September

September has always been one of my favorite months. Generally beautiful weather, a great time to work in the garden, that delicious leftover beginning-of-the-school-year feeling (I was one of those nerds who l-o-v-e-d school and couldn’t wait for it to start — still am, in a way).

This September seems to have snuck up on me, though. I still love it, and I’m glad it’s here, but I don’t feel quite as mentally prepared for it as I usually am. It’s been a crazy, busy year — a crazy-busy year, really. By the end of June I had invoiced as many editing and proofreading projects as I had for the whole of 2010, and more of them were editing than the year before, too. I completed (with the help of my mom) a couple of big garden projects and put down fifty bags of mulch, although I didn’t get to everything I had hoped to tackle this summer. I’m glad that there will still be some time yet this fall to try to get a jump on at least one of those projects for next year. I spent some of my rare downtime this summer thinking about and putting into place some systems and doing some reorganizing to help me move more efficiently through my work and personal projects (thanks in part to Jennifer Hoffman of Inspired Home Office). I want to write about some of that, too, in case it can help someone else in my place.

So, hello, September. I’m glad you’re here.

visitor

The owls like me. I once had a screech owl in my house, and we’ve had a great horned owl in our woods for the last couple of years. This afternoon, this guy decided to come and pay us a visit, perching in the woods just on the other side of the patio, maybe 30 feet away from where we were sitting. He’s a barred owl. I’ve been hearing him for a few weeks now, but this is the first time I’ve seen him. He sat there for about 10 minutes, upsetting a robin who must have a nest nearby. He flew off soon after the robin dove-bombed his head.

Obsession

I’ve spent the last couple of months experimenting with torch-fired enamels, and my enamel work is finally ready for prime time. I love the simplicity of the iridescent stamped copper cups along the bottom, but I’m beyond thrilled with the way the stacked pieces along the top came out.

These pieces will have their public debut tomorrow night at the Velvet Box open studio and trunk show (details in the sidebar).

Rocky River Fall Arts Festival

Today is a bit of a rush getting everything ready for the Rocky River Fall Arts Festival tomorrow. It was a great show for me last year, so I’m looking forward to doing it again.

I have a number of new etched copper pieces and stamped sterling silver pieces to bring with me, and I’m hoping to get a chance to finish up a few other pieces this afternoon.

This show will be the last hurrah for a number of older styles of chunky bracelets, too. They’ll be $10 off tomorrow, and anything left over will be taken apart and reworked into new pieces in the future.

If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll stop by and say hello. My tent will be close to Stino da Napoli again (and I’m hoping this time I’ll be bright enough to remember to order some takeout as I’m breaking down).

This Song Has No Title

There is a song titled such on Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I love that song, as I do most little ditties that clock in just over 2:00 on my favorite artists’ albums (hello, “Nightingale Song”), songs that say something interesting but aren’t full-fledged anthems and yet were fun enough to include on the album.

Titles stump me, more so than writing itself. The big blank space before all that other blank space. The hardest thing in J-school for me was coming up with something to write about. If someone gave me an assignment, no problem, but sniffing out the story just wasn’t my thing. So I’ve been working on trying to ignore that space at the beginning, to leave it there to breathe a little and just start in on the guts, to let it flow and see what happens.

I haven’t been doing that here much — waah-waah, bad posting habits, self-flagellationcakes, zzzzzzz — it seems like everything has been flowing better on paper lately, in those few spare moments there have been to focus on mental output rather than input. And it’s been all about developing projects and classes and brainstorming for the next book, nothing yet share-worthy.

It’s been a busy summer. Despite my vow to schedule myself lightly this summer and not let another pass by without fully embracing it, I found myself in June with a mountain of projects on my desk and a major event to coordinate and a case full of nothing new for my summer shows. I haven’t really taken much of a break since spring, and even back then it wasn’t enough. So, hello, August, with your leisurely pace and minimal must-dos and very few standing obligations.

Last weekend was the Avon Lake Summer Market, always my best show of the year, but especially so this year. It was the first time they did a two-day show, Friday night and Saturday, and it was lovely. It seemed a little busier on Friday than on Saturday, but it was steady throughout, and I was able to move out much of the older stock I’ve been carrying around and am sick of looking at. The rest is getting disassembled and some of it reworked into new pieces.

And speaking of reworking, it’s time to get up to the studio, to clean up and put away the detritus from last weekend, to knock out a few special orders, and to start work on some new things that have been lolling about in the back of my head.

whither summer?

Target has shrunk their summer things down to one pathetic little aisle and have had the back-to-school stuff out for a couple of weeks now. The lady at Lowe’s told me the citronella oil lanterns just inside the entrance were all they had left and that they’d be going on clearance soon.

It’s July.

This constant pushing ahead, pretending it’s two months later than it really is, drives me up a wall. What do you do when a hose springs a leak and you need to replace it in August? When your bathing suit tears? When a tree branch levels your patio table? You’re SOL, because you’re not going to find replacements in the stores.

Why do we have this urge to live in the future instead of enjoying the present? To push and push and push, until Christmas ornaments are out before Halloween, swimsuits hit the stores in February, and annuals appear at the home stores weeks before they can survive in this climate.

Don’t get me wrong. Project management is one of my things, and I understand needing to plan ahead and all that, but it’s getting ridiculous.

I want to live in the here and now, to not mourn summer before its time, to enjoy every last sunshiny breeze and juicy downpour.

Tetris

I’m a puzzle girl. I like putting my brain through its paces, figuring out how something goes together, knowing that there is a solution and if I’m patient enough, it will eventually reveal itself.

Even though I have a Kindle subscription to the Plain Dealer, I still subscribe to the hardcopy Sunday paper so I can get at the two giant crosswords and the sudoku. (Yes, I know you can get those online, too, but it’s just not nearly as satisfying to me to work those online as it is to sit with pen in hand and cat in lap.)

The week past and the one coming, however, are ruled by real-life Tetris. Tetris of the calendar + to-do list kind. On my plate right now are:

I know I can make this happen and still maintain my sanity. But well-wishes are still gratefully accepted.

the only constant is change

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about change lately, trying to make peace with the idea that it’s the state of change that is normal, that nothing stays the same, and that it’s good that it is so. See, I tend to travel within the ruts I wore into my path long ago. While I almost always have a lovely time and some fun surprises when I’m jolted out of those ruts, I (usually) feel comfortable there, and I don’t always take the time to reexamine them, to see if they are still working for me and if I still want to go where they are taking me. I think most people work that way.

So, I’m trying to pay more attention to my habits and to shift those that need shifting to reflect the way my life is now, not the way it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And I’m working hard at acknowledging where I came from while letting those former mes have a nice little tea party in the past, where they belong.

storms!

Crazy, loud, crash-after-crash-of-lightning storms in the middle of the night last night. I woke up just long enough to notice and to remember that I had indeed unplugged my computer before I went to bed, then just rolled over and went back to mostly asleep with the occasional “oh yeah, there’s another lightning strike close by” tick in my brain. Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, and despite going back to bed in the middle of the morning and getting another couple of hours, I was soooooo tired last night. The acres of Mexican food on my plate at dinner with a friend probably didn’t help in that department. But I was able to get some fabulous, wonderful sleep last night with the windows cracked open, storms or no storms, and this morning feels like luxury for it.

The one good thing about being up so early yesterday morning is that I was able to finish up a project and get it ready to ship out even before my normal wake-up time, so I was able to spend the rest of the day cleaning up a few nagging loose ends and getting ahead on one of my other projects (the one that will continue to eat this afternoon, despite my being a little ahead of schedule on it now).

I’ve got two weeks of constant motion and progress and plans in front of me, but I don’t mind. I’ve been working a lot this past year on the concept of flow, and working with my projects and obligations and such to swim through them gracefully, rather than treating them as objects that have to be hurdled or bullied or broken down into submission, and it’s made a huge difference in my work and how I feel about it.