Monthly Archives: January 2014

 

It’s a busy day today.  In the morning, we started the fireplace fixing project.  The pilot light went out and we had no idea  how to light it again.  I tried to follow the quick instruction we found under the fireplace, but it didn’t seem to work.   So L found the manual online and after I took the fireplace apart and moved the fake logs aside, I finally found the pilot light.  The method described in the instruction to light the pilot worked because I was able to see it then. It was hidden behind the window under the fake logs. Anyway, so mission accomplished.

L went hiking and I went to Staples and Sam’s. Got lots of labels and some 22lb 94 bright paper for more Midori booklets. The 24lb is a bit heavy. But after writing in the book I made yesterday I actually quite like it. The ink doesn’t bleed through, not even the highlighter. Paper is very smooth too. But I’ll still make another book with the 22 lb paper and see how that performs.

This is a whole new territory for me. I have never tried to make my own pages to write or decorate before. But all this is stirring up my creative juice. And it gives me the motivation to write and think and in a way, it fuels me to write here too. For some strange reason, life seems to be fun again.

 

 

 

L and I went to Bestbuy and ordered the Bosche 800 series dish washer and an upright freezer.  Delivery day is in February.  We are actually not in a hurry since our dish washer still works and the freezer can definitely wait.  Both of us are excited about the dish washer.   We don’t need to prewash our dishes any more.

I didn’t sleep well last night, was still awake by 4am and finally fell asleep after that.  So all day today, I’m tired and especially after lunch at O’Charly’s and a bloody marry I really want to take a nap.  But I decided to stay awake and hopefully will be able to fall asleep easier tonight.

So I went downstairs and started printing Midori page inserts.  Since all of them are in A4 size, I had to do a lot of trial and error to convert them to letter size for printing.  Then a few youtube videos later, I was making an insert that would hold papers, and learning about drilling holes and making booklets.  I had a good time actually.  It doesn’t really take that long to print, trim, bind and put these booklets together.  And it gives you a sense of accomplishment that you made the notebooks yourself and put them together.

Of course there will be more refinement and improvements in the future for me.  But I feel pretty good about the day.

 

 

 

 

 

I have been working on these mittens for a long time now.  Not that they take long to knit, but I started it a few months ago and then other Christmas projects got in the way and I just got back to it a couple of days ago.  It probably only takes a few days for a mitten and I quite enjoy the color work watching the design appears in front of my eyes.  Got the kit from Knitpick to do 12 pairs.  This is probably the second pair and I can’t find the first pair, probably gave it to E but I can’t remember.  That’s how bad my memory has got.  So keeping some record in this blog gives me a way to get in touch of the past in some way.

The midori traveler’s notebook came today together with the A5 punch from Time system for my filofax. Tried the punch and it does work great for the A5 pages, yay!! I have been searching for a punch for a long time now and the $70 Filofax punch just doesn’t seem to worth the money. This one is only about $25 dollars. I am very happy with it.

Used the free DIY pages from Ray Blake’s <a href=http://www.mylifeallinoneplace.com> Mylifeallinoneplace</a> site and printed some Midori grid pages. They don’t work just the way it is when printed on letter size paper. I have to trim it to size and the grid isn’t centered on the page either. I don’t want to sew them together but my stapler isn’t long enough to fit the paper in. So I ordered a long arm stapler on Amazon. This pursuit of paper is getting bigger every day. So far, I do enjoy it. Like a lot of the paper agenda lovers say, there is something to writing things down. It sticks to your mind better than typing it on a screen.

Still working on the work flow for blogging. I can use the WordPress app on my iphone to send a picture to the blog and write about them later. That seems to be the only way I find now to get the picture to the blog site instead of getting a link to a picture that sits somewhere else. Don’t like to depend on some server elsewhere for the pictures on my site.

The Mac Power Users just had an episode on photo management. And they mentioned uploading the photos to Flickr for storage. you get a TB free there. Maybe that’s an option as a backup for my pictures in addition to the copy on my Promise Pegasus. The NES drive that L just got can be another backup. When I got the Promise Pegasus, I thought that would be it for my backup. But a lightening that destroyed 2 drives in it, also destroyed all my photos up to that point. So you have to have more than one copy to ensure the safety of your files.

Right now I am using a Logitech blue tooth keyboard with my ipad to type up this blog. I also use it with my MacBook Pro. It is solar charged or light source charged, and can sync up to 3 devices. So I can just take the keyboard with me around the house to use with either my ipad or the MacBook Pro. I really do like this keyboard.

We just went to Bestbuy and looked at dish washer and freezer today. Bosch seems to be the craze now and we will probably go back tomorrow and pull the trigger on both. L won’t be yelled at by me any more for not rinsing his plates. Our dish washer that came with the condo is the cheapest they could find. It just doesn’t clean the dishes. Food gets stuck on the plates and ruined them, especially the tomato sauce. Hopefully it won’t be a concern for the new dish washer.

 

Bath day for Benny again.  It’s been a week.  I’m supposed to bathe him twice a week with the shampoo the vet gave me to address his biting issue of his leg.  But he has not been biting since he was on the steroid and antibiotic last week.  And I have been sick for a few days too.  But it’s a good day today to do it.  He doesn’t like it but he puts up with it like a good dog he is.

 

 

 

Trying out the IFTTT to send photo I take from the iphone to this blog automatically. I can then come back and add text later. It is working so far. Pretty neat!

You have to download the IFTTT app to the iphone first, then activate the photos channel and your wordpress channel for this recipe to work. And the photo is actually saved on IFTTTs site not on the wordpress site. Not sure I like this setup, would like to have the photos reside on my blog server since it is hosted at home. Hopefully there is an alternative.

 

 

Got Up super early again around 6am. Actually stayed up and left the house around 10am with L to run some errands.  I was impressed by how few cars were on the street and realized that if you get out before noon then more than likely, you will see fewer cars on the street.  Something to keep in mind.

i was able to take a longish nap in the afternoon and woke up around 2pm and had the rest of the day to play with my iphone and ipad.  Worked on the Launch app and the IFTTT recipe.  Both went along pretty well.

One of the errands was to get better paper to print pages for my filofax. I have also ordered an A5 punch yesterday.  Can’t wait to see how well that will work.  Midori is on the way, but the paper is coming from Japan I think.  Both were ordered from Amazon but different sellers.  Will rethink about buying from US sellers in the future.

 

 

Slept again till after noon, although I did wake up and had coffee around 6am and stayed up till about 9am before I fell back to sleep.  I’ve been reading blogs and looking at planner setups lately and finally after lunch today, I felt good enough to go down to my office and started printing out some filofax pages from Philofaxy and mylifeallinoneplace.  Last night, I started on my bullet journaling and dumped a lot of ideas in my moleskine.  Today they are migrating into my filofax in different sections.

Trying to figure out how to print those free inserts is a bit testing.  They are designed for A4 papers not letter size papers.  So it’s kind of wasting the letter size papers if you can only print one A5 per page.  Haven’t even tried to print in duplex yet.  That would be a skill only time can perfect.

So far, I have the 365/30 list for January printed and in my lists section, I have a To Buy, a To Do, a To Learn and a Goals page in this section.  I have a Projects section too, in it I put the Monthly activity tracking page from Philofaxy and actually have a project to print the inserts pages for filofax.  This section will grow and there will be tracking for the projects in here too.  I figured, only listing a project and what is in it is not enough, there has to be a tracking of activities of some kind to keep the boat rolling.

Finally, I’m getting started with my Finchly A5 filofax in a real way.  It’s a motivation of itself to keep going.  I am tasting the excitement and the desire to go and work in it that I see in other fellow filofax owners.  I feel more productive when I have a plan to tackle those things I want to do.

There is one caution I keep reminding myself though, do not make busy work for your life just to be busy.  There are so many people that drive themselves crazy of all the work/tasks they come up that they feel are necessary to feel productive and good about themselves.  I don’t believe in that any more.  The work life I had for over 30 years, was way busy doing work that someone else has come up and demanded, timeline, deadlines, stress, depression came as a result.  Now when I look back, there was little value in those busy work.  Just busy work.  Got to get this web page up by this event, got to do another redesign by this date, got to do the updates at 5:30am or all hell breaks loose.  Ridiculous stress for everybody for makeup reasons that someone thinks are important.  No, not going there again.

So I will make plans to do things that motivate and interest me while I learn new skills and enjoy the joy creativity brings along.  That’s a good life.

Got the cold or something since yesterday. Slept the whole day and most of today too. Late afternoon after I woke up, ideas kept jumping up at me from browsing the web in my iPad. Motivation struck and I started my billet journal in a pink soft cover moleskine. Still a newbie at it, trying to find my way in this new system.

I do have a lot of tools at my disposal. Just ordered a Mindoro travelers notebook from Amazon. Now it’s time to decide how to use these tools. I have an A5 Filofax, an ARC notebook, a day timer, some moleskine notebooks. Lots of colored pens and markers and some stickers and washi tapes. Yes, I am ready.

I have been following Carrie Harling’s site, my life all in one place, philofaxy. And a few other random YouTube videos on journaling. Wish I can draw like some of them. But I think my creativity is limited to recording in photos. Not so much in drawing. So maybe I can use photos to do some journaling. Need to think outside of the box and come up with some new ideas.

The cold weather is coming, the TV weather person is advising everybody to stay inside.  High is 23 and low could be -18.  It is supposed to be -8 now downtown Kent.  Yep, it is a day of working on the computer and staying out of the cold.

Called the vet just now and made an appointment to take Benny in to see the vet tomorrow.  He is still chewing on his tail where there are two growths and the bladder stone isn’t going anywhere.  Need to talk to the vet and find out what our strategy should be.  I don’t want him to go through the knife for one stone.  But the blood is not a good thing either.  And the growth on his tail is bothering him a lot.  The last suggestion by the vet is to chop his tail off.  Ouch!  I don’t like that idea very much.  This is the downside of having a pet, you have to go through its health problems especially when it gets older.  Not very pleasant to deal with.  And for me, I get super worried and it affects my sleep and my mood the whole time.  So, no more pets after these two, Tido and Benny.

Other than that, I installed Desktopserver on my macbook pro to test some wordpress templates.  Thinking about redoing my site.  But every time I tried to find a template, I ended up giving up after hours of looking.

I’m not happy with the navigation of my photos page.  It has different styles over time using different software and they don’t go back to my photo page after viewing the individual page in a uniform manner.   It’s one of my projects to tackle this year.  So I will find a way to at least bring the viewers back to the same place for all the photos.

Trying to use Evernote for my filofax page archive and hoping to make them searchable.  But so far no success.  The OCR does not recognize my handwriting.  I guess I have to separate every character even though I print them. If they run into each other then the OCR won’t recognize the letters.  Not working as well as I have hoped.

We lilk this little restaurant up above the Tinkers Creek in Walton Hills. In the summer time, we will go there for lunch a couple of times and it is gorgeous when you sit outside looking down at the creek and across the creek the golf course. I took a little clip when we were there this summer and forgot about it till I checked the SD card today. So here it is.

Tinker Creek Tavern