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

Posted by Instagrate to WordPress

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.

L-M-N-O-P

Totally cheating on the post-a-day thing here, but life outside the electronic box has stepped in and said “hey, pay some attention to me” over the past couple of days, so there went that. And that’s absolutely okay.

L is for luxury, M is for money, N is for new, O is for “ottomobile,” and P is for perfect. That wraps up the last week of buying a new car on a more accelerated schedule that we had originally planned.

My old Saturn was starting to have problems more regularly, and I was getting sick of not having a reliable car. So, we started car shopping last Sunday, rather than waiting until summer, as we had originally planned.

I knew going in that I wanted a small SUV. I hadn’t shopped for a car for fourteen years or so, and, sadly, Saturn no longer exists, so I wanted to drive a bunch of things to see what’s out there. From looks alone, I liked the Toyota RAV4, the Subaru Forester, and the Hyundai Tucson, and I wanted to shop a lot of what was in that class.

Last Saturday was about Internet research, reading reviews and doing comparisons. I knocked the Hyundai out based on a few reviews, and also based on a bit of lingering leeriness of Korean cars. Sunday morning, I had it narrowed down to the Honda CRV (even though I think the new ones are kind of ugly), the RAV4, and the Forester, with a few backups for round 2, if it came to that.

I drove the CRV first, and I thought it was fine. It has a nice backup camera, and the interior is thoughtfully laid out. John didn’t like the ride at all, though, and it was still ugly.

The RAV4 was second, and I really liked it.

Subaru wasn’t open on Sunday, so I had to wait until Tuesday to test drive the Forester. And I ended up really liking it, too.

At that point I had two solid choices, either of which I would be perfectly happy with, and thus decided I didn’t need to drive anything else.

I went back to both Subaru and Toyota on Wednesday and drove both again to compare them back to back and get a few questions answered. Each had a few pros and cons. The Subaru had a smaller video screen, but it was positioned better under an overhang to minimize glare. The Toyota offered Sirius/XM standard, whereas to get it on the Subaru, you had to get the navigation package (which I wasn’t interested in). Although the measurements were about the same, the Subaru felt more spacious and like it had more visibility. The Toyota offered a blind spot monitor. The Toyota salesman was much less salesman-y and worked for a dealership with a better reputation.

In the end, the Subaru won by a hair, and we went back on Saturday to make a deal. Four hours later, including a few moments when we almost walked out, I had a new car. I wasn’t actually expecting to drive one home that day, not only because of the craziness of dealmaking, but also because these new Foresters are in demand and I didn’t think they’d have one with the things I wanted on the lot, but there it was. The only thing on my wish list I did without was the Homelink garage door opener. I solved that by ordering a much smaller replacement remote opener than the current one (which doesn’t fit well anywhere in the new car).

While the car shopping process sucks, and I don’t want to do it again anytime soon, I’m quite pleased with what I ended up with.

K is for karma

While I’m not a religious person, I do believe in a kind of karma, in that the kind of energy you put out into the world is what tends to come back to you. Maybe not all the time, and maybe not right away, but usually and eventually.

I don’t think there’s any old white guy hanging up there in the sky, or any giant spreadsheet keeping score, tit-for-tat style. I don’t know what the mechanism is, or even if there has to be a mechanism at all.

If you’re kind to others and treat them well, overall people tend to be kind to you and treat you well.

J is for junk

Junk tends to creep up on me. I keep little bits and bobs of things, knowing that they might someday be useful, kind of a like a refugee from the Great Depression born fifty years too late. It doesn’t help that I have an affection for found-object art and aspire to one day make something that doesn’t look merely like a bunch of stuff attached to other stuff, but is cohesive and feels like it has a deeper meaning.

Junk isn’t always useful, though. Sometimes it’s just being too lazy to make a decision about something, or getting around to actually disposing of it properly. A recent mouse incident in our garage ended with me spending half a day sorting out one specific corner of the garage that had become a catch-all for indecision.

That corner houses, among other things, my show supplies, which tend to end up and stay in a random pile when I unpack after a show, and which themselves need a thorough sorting out and purge once the weather gets a little nicer. I need to add a to-do to my show project list that includes sorting through them a few days later and putting them back where they belong, rather than wherever is most convenient.

I had been saving wine bottles for an artsy friend who uses them, but she twice cancelled pick-up dates and in the meantime they had grown cobwebs and dust and who knows what all, so into the recycle bin they went. Lots of broken-down cardboard boxes ended up there, too.

There were boxes of things to take to Goodwill, a couple of stray tools, paintbrushes that didn’t get put back into the painting things box, and the like.

(I am absolutely terrible when things are piled in front of other things. It’s the kiss of death for ever putting anything away.)

I was able to get that corner sorted out, but have several more to go. I’m looking forward to having my nephew’s help as soon as the weather cooperates and we can take absolutely everything out, clean, and put it all back in a way that makes sense.

I is for Internet

It amazes me how quickly the Internet has become so ingrained into my everyday life. I was an early tech adopter — first exposure to email in 1990, first home computer in 1993 — and am now full spectrum with laptop, iPhone, and iPad. My Google-fu is strong. People will call me to ask me to look something up for them because they know I’ll find it much more quickly than they will.

I love living in this age of abundant information. Sure, it can be overwhelming sometimes, but I’d rather have too much info than not enough. I’m buying a new car this week, and I can’t imagine ever doing this this old-fashioned way again. It was easy to find info from not only car maker’s sites but also third party reviewers and forums for drivers. I was able to go into each dealership with a good sense of what I wanted to look at and what each model included, saving everyone time.

I keep my iPad in the family room, and I often look up info on whatever we’re watching on IMDB, or if I’m not actively watching whatever is on the TV, I’m reading the New York Times or catching up on blogs via Newsify or otherwise paddling around in the Internet waters.

Viva la Internet!