Now that is a totally mundane title, but it does tell you exactly what this post is about. Yesterday, I planted the last flowers I intend to plant for the year. I moved Lantana from it’s middle of the yard outgrowth to a spot in the flowerbed, and I planted the two live Sweet William plants on the other side of the same bed. The mixed flowers I planted in the other bed are coming up now, and hopefully I’ll see a few blooms once it gets cool enough to enjoy the evenings sitting in outdoor furniture. Right now, it’s too blasted hot to do very much of that. Unless your air conditioner is broken like mine has been. Then outside is definitely better than in! Much better.

I have been collecting post ideas for my various blogs for a while, and tey were all stacked in an unruly pile on my desk, where I could never find the specific page I needed when I was ready to blog. As a result, I have missed blogging about some things I thought were pretty important, because the event passed and I forgot about it until it was too late.

I’ve done a couple of things to help with that problem. One, I have started using Google calendar and I also bought this nifty thing:

It holds my idea articles, dividing by blog topic, and I can find just what I need when I need it. And it looks perky sitting on my desk. I like perky.

And there we have it: one more way I’m trying to keep my sanity.

I finally caught up on my feed reading this morning, and Have a few things to share with you. There would have been more, but my system crashed and I lost a lot of the pieces I wanted to go back and read and share.

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That’s it. I spent the rest of the evening taming this:

and getting my work schedule into Google Calendar. Doesn’t a clean desk just feel so good?

And I am hopeful that it will allow me to get more done. Football season has started, and that means my Saturdays are now full, fuller, fullest, at least through October. I told you a few days ago about my new notebook method of organizing myself, and you saw I still have a massive to-do list with many, many hours-long projects on it. (By the way, that is working extremely well for me, hold that thought, I’ll get back to it in a minute.)

Anyway, since I am working until about 10pm most nights to cram everything in, I prefer to NOT work all weekend, too, and since Saturday is busy, I am now taking Wednesdays-for-Work. Clearing the desk, clearing the email inbox, and clearing that to-do list, too. No school, no housework. It seems to be working–it’s only noon, and my regular work is done, except for one post, and I am doing some chewing on that in the back of my mind. I guess that means it’s time to work on the desk and email, right?

Now back to that thought above. I did indeed streamline my notebook, and this is how I did it. I made 10 columns across a 2 page spread, and that holds 2 weeks worth of Monday-Friday checklists and blogging schedules. Then, I can use as many pages after that as I need to hold to-do lists and notes and such. I can follow that up with another column spread (possibly using 4 pages to hold a month’s worth) so that I can work on the same notes and to-do list, because my to-do list stays oo long to accomplish it all in a week. Unless this new Wednesdays-for-Work thing goes way better than I could hope or imagine.

Is this blog stalling out for anyone else? I’ve come here a couple of times in the past couple of days and the thing just stalled out on the load. No content, no sidebar, just the background. Do I need to enable the cache, do you think?

In other news………nothing. Still working on my project, and I am pushing to be through today. I’ve been pre-occupied with it long enough.

Several days ago, Laura from Organizing Junkie posted about her blogging notebook. I mulled that post over for several days. In fact, I left the tab open and I looked at it almost every day for a week. At roughly the same time, I reread an article on editorial calendars that I had read a while back, and suddenly things began to gel. Once I had figured out all the things I needed to keep track of I put pencil to paper. This is my second week on the notebook method, and here is what the set of pages I have used this week looks like. I took the picture this morning, as I was planning my day, after I decided that today’s post would be the notebook.

You can see it gets pretty messy by Friday, LOL. But I have to tell you, I have gotten more work done this week that I have in the past month, just because I am no longer spinning my wheels wondering what I am supposed to be doing.

On the left is a list of reviews and blog posts I need to write, across all my blogs. Beside this is my to-do list. I know that it looks like I have not done a lot of it this week, but I can assure you that the checked off items were biggies, and took several hours of sustained effort each. On the right are my daily trackers. I use that side to keep track of: which girl is cleaning the kitchen today, which boy is cleaning the small bathroom, what three household chores are the priority, how much money I make (hey, I’m keeping it real), the daily posts on my three main blogs, which other blogs I am posting on, what’s for supper, and my daily calorie and saturated fats count. I decided recording the number of potty runs was a bit much, though if I ever get to go alone, I may note it. In the back of the book are lists of post ideas for all my blogs. When I read, it is beside me so I can take notes. The notebook goes where I go, except to bed, because when I go to bed, it’s to sleep, not work.

I do think that I will make some weeks up in advance, probably by running a block of Monday through Friday across the top of the left hand page. That way, it won’t be such a hassle to note when the next post is due on the non-daily blogs (that’s what is making the review and posts column so long). Any questions?

One of the myriad tasks I did Monday was to put up a new clothesline. My old one sorta kinda died last year (maybe the year before??), and I had been without one for some time. And then I had to snap a picture! I forgot about it yesterday, but I hung this loads of whites out today. I love to see clothes on a clothesline. The way they flap in the breeze, there is just something so right about it.

Do you have things that you see or do that …. seem to connect you to a shared past? Actions so familiar that they are timeless and universal?? Tasks so much a part of life that you look down at your hands and they could be any hands??? For me it is hanging out clothes, sewing, and making biscuits. These are tasks that I have seen done so often that when I do them it is like looking into the tunnel of the past. My hands become my mother’s hands become my grandmother’s hands become her mother’s hands become her mother’s hands and so on, forever into the past.

And today, my daughter’s hands were beside mine as she helped me do this work of the ages. I did a lot of chores today. I am well spent to say the least. And not one of them was more satisfying than this one.