Gorgeous sunset

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a little unexpected snow

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Sun on downtown Cleveland

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Gray clouds over Lake Erie

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Happiness on my desk

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Extra-frosty morning

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Early morning snow

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Kitty visitors in the calm before the storm

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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.