back yard

ecesis

n : (ecology) the process by which a plant or animal becomes
established in a new habitat [syn: {establishment}

I’m in a place right now.  I’m not exactly sure what caused it, what the motivation was.  It’s been, by all rights, a very, very good day — I was up exceedingly early (which makes me happy; I have delusions of being a Morning Person again someday), got everything in my usual routine done by nine a.m., worked steadily until noonish on soap and various other filler projects (got roughly a hundred soaps made before noon, even.).  I even answered and/or edited my email down to under 60 for the first time in, oh, say, a year and a half.

I should be ecstatic.  I should be bouncing off walls and throwing parties in my own honor and breaking my own elbow patting myself on the back.

But I’m not.

It almost feels like I’m warring with myself.  Like some part of my brain is declaring on another part.  It’s hard to explain.

I’ll try.  Bear with me here.  It might come out all stilted and crazy, because, really, that’s how it feels.

I’m ambitious.  I’m driven.  I learn quickly and thus, tend to get bored easily.  Or, rather, not bored, really, but inquisitive.  I’m an overachiever and a total perfectionist, which means that I’m also a procrastinator.  (If it can’t be perfect, why do it at all?  That kind of thing.)

In addition, I also have certain physical limitations.  The accident in ‘03 left me with a brain that sometimes doesn’t make connections the way it should.  Analogy: it’s like the word train is speeding along at 75 mph and suddenly, there’s no track.  There’s no framework and no words.  Not so good for someone who writes and talks for a living most of the time.  (And to be fair, it’s not as bad as it used to be.  It used to happen mid-sentence, during speech.  I’d just…stop talking.  Forget what I was talking about, thinking about.  I’m glad that part has mostly passed, excepting times of stress and random intervals that are further apart now than before.)

Also a part of that accident — I effectively have no education.  None that I can remember, at least.  College disappeared with a nine-inch chunk of my skull.  So did most of my first marriage.  (Not necessarily a bad thing, there, but still…)  So did my grandmother’s name, for a while.  And portions of my childhood.  Large pieces of who I am.

I’ve made peace with most of that.  The ambition holds hands with my limitations.  It’s just me.  And I’m okay with Me.

Days like today, though — they happen.  Not often, because I’m just not nearly as prone to sitting around feeling sorry for myself anymore.  It’s a waste of my time, and time’s the one thing of which I won’t ever have enough.

See…from the outside, it looks like I’ve done a helluvalot with my life.  And I have, really, when one looks at it subjectively through the eyes of someone interested in what I’ve done.  I’ve built communities for ten years — first with online journal webrings and communities, then with publishing and the related arts, and now with Lime & Violet and all the places that’s evolved to.  I get emails from people who tell me how much they love the stuff we do around here.  How we’ve helped them in one way or another, or connected them with new friends, or led them into new things.

And I’m so grateful for every one of those letters.  I don’t always answer, because it wraps me up in that little ball of wordlessness that my brain hands me, but I keep them.  Every one of them.  In a file folder, both on the computer and in the desk, and when I wonder why the hell I’m working eighteen hours a day sometimes, I pull them out and point at them and remind myself that that right there is why I’m working so hard.  Those people.  Every one of them.  And every one that doesn’t write me, too.

It’s only when I start looking objectively at it all — or at least what passes for objectivity in my perception of the outside world — that I start questioning what I’m doing.  Where I’m going with it all.  What purpose this has in the larger scheme of things.  How I look to the outside world.

I’m not doing anything. I want to be.  But I’m really just spinning in place — in a place I don’t want to be (physically), doing the same things over and over, and failing to take any kind of root because my leaves are reaching for a different sun.

I want to be a part of the world, not just sitting here in relative isolation, butt grafted to the computer chair, occasionally taking breaks to interact with the world.  I have all this experience, all this drive, all this innate knowledge — but I’m utterly unsuited for anything other than what I’m doing now.

I am, all whining aside, completely afraid of being something more, because tehre’s no way I could walk in and be the best at it.  I just don’t know enough; I have skills, but not the right ones.  Not the ones that would make this life so much easier.

Huge changes need to occur this year to get me where I want to go.  Huge ones.  Not all of them are decided by me, even, which leaves me in a place where I’m not even remotely in control.  And I question every step I take, backpedalling and moving forward and learning and growing and finding that those roots…?  Not in solid ground.  I’m like a transplanted tree that’s in six inches of dirt — something’s eventually going to give, and I’m going to topple over.

At least that’s how it feels.

I’m aware enough to know that it’s not objective truth.

Sometimes, it feels like I’m looking out into my life from behind the glass — and I don’t much like what I see there.

I just wish I could acclimate.  Find my footing.  Find out who I need to be to be what I want to be.  To make the right steps, the right decisions, the right moves.  To be who I am, maintain and encourage the principles and vision I live by, and to get out of this rut where I’m doing too much for not enough.  Because really, that’s what’s happening right now.  I could go into it all, but it would read like a laundry list of complaints, and I have better things to do than dwell on what’s wrong.  Too many steps left to get what’s right to waste that kind of time.

I know change doesn’t happen overnight, especially not for me.  Thinking is laborious and involves a lot of note-taking and writing for me, thanks to that word-disconnect problem sometimes.

But could we speed it up a bit, please?  I’m not getting any younger, and I miss the life I’ve never had.

Nobody can do it but me.

And until this unsure part of me finishes its battle with the ambitious part, I’m here in the middle.

Trying to grow.

I was perched here several weeks ago, watching the clouds roll in and the rain fall in sporadic fits and starts, thinking that all I wanted — all I really wanted to do more than anything in the world — was sit here.  In this spot.  With the smell of coffee wafting around my head and the low buzz of people talking behind me and the whooshing rush of milk foaming and the slow drone in my brain telling me that it was really, really comfortable here, despite the bustle and the weather and the rush to get to a plane.

It was one of those moments where time slowed down for me.  Or maybe I slowed down to the speed of time, rather than rushing ahead of it as if it might catch me if I stopped at all, even just long enough to pause and breathe.

The moment didn’t last long.  My phone rang, my email beeped, my notebook called me from the table with half-written PDFs about, ironically, slowing down to let your work gain the intention you’re seeking.

For that moment, though — and it was a long moment, pregnant with understanding and some unspoken need for peace — everything danced only to the rhythm of an unseen heartbeat.  All was well.  All was in harmony.  All was where it should be.

I was where I should be.

Part of the machine instead of trying to control the switch.

* * *

All day today, my life’s been about looking ahead.  Looking forward with strategy and vision and leading people and entities into some kind of unseen future that we’re only guessing about.  Determining needs, anticipating trends, delivering experiences.

I’ve been practicing Focus, and doing okay with it.  Not fabulously — I’m still distracted, and often procrastinate more than I should in getting started with the things I know I really need to do — but okay.  I’m aware of it, though.  Aware of what I’m doing, like I’m standing outside myself watching, and trying to be nonjudgemental, but firm.

Once I’m started, Focus seems to happen naturally.  I get into what I do.  I’m involved, I’m a part of it.  I find that flow and move forward with the current I’ve created, trying to take stock of where the rocks are so I can avoid them next time, learning something new with each new bend in the river.

I learn so much from the people around me.  Their methods, their systems, their way of interacting and their way of dealing with what’s handed to them.

People, in short, inspire me.

*  *  *

I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, despite his scary hair.  (And it is some scary hair.  Ever seen it?  Big.  Makes mine look like Big Hair In Training.  Personally, I think it’s his brain trying to escape from a skull that’s obviously just too small and limiting, because, and I mean this, the man is brilliant.  I may not always agree with his assessments and assertations, but he is a master at presenting them and making his case and making me think, and that, alone, is enough to keep me reading, despite the Hair Terror.)

In it, Gladwell puts forth that what we know about success,  and those who achieve it,  may be wrong, culturally speaking.  We see the everyday man, through hard work and discipline, as a self-made man (or woman).  That he, himself, is the delineating factor between making it and languishing.  That there’s some quality in them that makes them primed for success early on, and that if we emulate that quality, anyone can achieve amazing things.

I’m half-way through the book (on paper — Audible didn’t have it at the time I bought it…), and I have to say, his picking apart of this cultural mythology is both eye-opening and terrifying.  I won’t go into a lot of it here — you’ll need to pick up the book if you want more information — but I can say this much:  I agree.  And I don’t.  And while I agree with most of what he’s saying, I’m hoping beyond all hope that he’s wrong and that there are exceptions.  (Which may well be in the part of the book I haven’t read yet.)

Gladwell asserts that certain people are given tools early on in life to more adequately prepare them for opportunities that come later.  That two boys of equal intelligence and drive can be thrust into similar situations, and the one with these skills will come out ahead.  (And, in fact, that if all other things were equal, the more affluent and/or one with more involved and supportive parents will come out ahead.)

I baffled my mom and dad.  I think I still confuse the crap out of my mom.  They had no idea how to handle me, even early on, and as a result, I really ran with that, staying just outside of the normal system and running wild.  I had a deep distrust of (and at times, loathing for) authority of all types, and as a result, never learned properly how to deal with them.

As a kid, that meant having a profoundly bad attitude and/or ignoring authority altogether.  As an adult, it means that even when I want to work with them, I sometimes have problems relating to anyone that I put mentally in a position of authority.  I can respect them to all get out.  I can love them dearly.  But if I make that mental switchover to thinking of them as Authority Figure rather than who they are?  I go mute.

Which, as most of you know just by knowing me in any capacity, is pretty unusual.  “Quiet” is not one of those adjectives often used to describe me.  (Heh.)

Anyway, this is one of those skills that I wasn’t ever given.  I never learned how to interact with people in this way, and in my life now, when a general rebellion against authority isn’t nearly so cute as it was twenty years ago, and in an environment where my peers are every bit as authoritative as I am?  So not good.

So therein lies part two of what I’m thinking this year’s life education might be for me.  I need to knock this crap off before it ends up damaging the way I want my life to go.  I’m relatively confident in most other areas of my life, so this one shouldn’t be all that hard to get over, get around, get through.

I just need to stay aware.  Stand still every so often, outside myself, and really look at what I’m doing, what I’m thinking.

Simplify.  Focus.  Be aware.  Speak.

And never fail to stop and feel the moment when it presents itself.

After yesterday’s clear vision of what I used to want my life to look like (and, for the sake of honesty, still do, when I’m being all silent and still and listening to that quiet little heart of hearts…), today’s been a blur. A blur of projects and clean-ups and writing and making soap and making room in the shelves even more.

(That last one…I know y’all come here, and every time I update, it seems like I’m talking about throwing more stuff out. One would think my shelves would all be bare and there’d be nothing left but me, the dogs, and a few dust bunnies holding congress under the space where the table used to be. But it’s not like that — I really do keep clearing things out, and I’m not bringing in nearly as much as is going out, but it’s been four years of acquisition, and 3 years in a house before that, too. Add that I just recently — in the grand timeline — have had my own money…well…it’s just sad. Sad and cluttered and overgrown with the leftover weeds, kind of. One day, I’ll have enough stuff gone to actually have a shot at that uncluttered, spartan, simple existence. Until then, it’s tossed out more crap again today over and over again. I apologize in advance. And, go figure, I’ve digressed again. In paragraph two. That’s gotta be some kind of record.)

ANYWAY, a blur. Today has been a giant blur. A giant happy blur.

I re-signed up for Audible.com, figuring that I could totally listen to some of these books instead of reading them. Yes, that means I bought some of them twice, effectively. But it also means that I can listen, and if I hate it, I can get rid of the physical object and just keep the audio file in case I need it someday. (Mostly business stuff. Marketing books. That kind of thing. Geekery of my own brand, trust me.) Plus, it means I can knit and still be entertained.

Twisted Ribbons, the malabrigo scarf, is now almost 1/3 done, thanks to one of those books today. It’s amazing how, when I’m focused like a laser beam on one thing, it gets done. None of this jumping between projects and feeling scattered like sparkly confetti in front of a fan. I set the timer for a certain amount of time (the one on my phone, no less…I so love that thing.), and just focused. Concentrated. One thing. It was weird for me, since I’m used to multitasking to the point of distraction and doing a row here and there and hoping for the best. By the time the alarm rang, the scarf was a foot longer and I felt like I’d just slept eight hours. I love that.

I also tossed out the old stockpot I’d been using to master-batch all of my soap oils. For those of you who aren’t soapmakers, that might not make much sense. Lemme explain, briefly: When you make soap, it’s usually not just one oil you’re using. You have a combination of oils with different properties (some make softer soap, some make more cleansing soap, some make more moisturizing…each has its own strong points and weak points, and you come up with a combo that tries to emphasize the strong points while minimizing the other effects.)…all in different proportions. Most recipes and soap calculators will give you the proportions in pounds or ounces, and you mix up what you need, add the lye and water and such, and mix up just one batch at a time.

When you master-batch your oils, you take those recipes and compound them. Measure the oils once for a whole bunch of batches, all at the same time, and then just measure out what you need in order to make one batch at a time, no matter how big of a batch you’re making. (For home soapmakers, that’s usually somewhere between three and twelve pounds, depending on how big your molds are. Mine are four or five, depending.)

Batching up the oils takes the longest, of any of the other steps. (Other than the curing, where you don’t have to do anything but wait for the chemical reaction to finish itself up, so I don’t count that as a step.) By master-batching a bunch at a time, you save yourself an INFINITE amount of time, seemingly. You can batch once and make soap all day long, if you want.

I’d been making enough for six batches at a time before this. I had a stock-pot that was literally the biggest one they had at a local discount store, and six batches fit in there pretty nicely. It was full, and I rarely did more than six in a day anyway. (Once batched, you can store the oils for quite a while, however. It’s nice.)

For my birthday this year, my in-laws gave me a giant stockpot. I mean that. GIANT. Like, I could actually sit in it comfortably GIANT. I hadn’t used it for anything other than kettle-dying yarn, and even then, I couldn’t lift it once the wet yarn and dye solution was in it. It was THAT big.

I broke it out tonight and decided to just start batching oils until I couldn’t fit any more in the pot, or I ran out of something. One of the two.

FIFTY POUNDS of oils later….

No, seriously. FIFTY freakin’ POUNDS. Of OIL.

….I was half-full.

I know. I about fainted, myself.

I couldn’t lift it if I’d put more in it, so I cooked the whole shebang over low heat until they all melted together, and now I’ve got enough reserve to make something like fifteen batches of soap when I have the urge/time again. (Which might be tomorrow, actually.) Two hundred bars of soap there in that one stockpot the size of a small starter apartment.

And what’s worse? I didn’t use up anything. Insert facepalm here. I used a lot, of a lot of things, but I still have enough for a whole lot more.

This getting simplified thing is a whole lot of work.

* * *

Earlier tonight, one of my focus points was to keep going through the notebook pile to get rid of as many notes as I can. I’m putting everything on Evernote, like I mentioned in one of those earlier entries down there…keeping it all accessible from my iPhone and online, since I’m never all that far from either one of those, and my notes can’t get buried under a pile somewhere and end up lost or destroyed.

I have a lot of notebooks. I’m one of those notebook people, actually. If it’s pretty and blank, I’ll probably buy it, even though I end up using five pages and forgetting where I put it. (The exception: Moleskines. Someday, I will sing sonnets to Moleskine here, and explain why I love them so much. But this entry is long enough as it is. Expect sonnets. And love poems. And possibly an English madrigal or two, sung in the round. Just sayin’.) I have a collection of notebooks, formerly strewn all over the house, that I’ve slowly been compiling into one giant stack to go through when I had time.

Today, I dove in. Started with a Hello, Kitty binder full of mostly-blank sheets of Badtz Maru paper (oh, but seriously), from 1999.

Nineteen. Ninety. Nine.

A DECADE. And it was STILL mostly blank. This should tell me something about myself, I’m sure.

I pitched it, with a fair bit of guilt. I mean, Hello, Kitty. I’m thirty-seven years old. I’ve lugged that thing from San Diego to Riverside to Seattle to Norfolk to Madison to Iowa. Five times, I’ve had the opportunity to toss it. Five times, I’ve deemed freakin’ Hello Kitty too important to throw away.

Pardon the internet acronym, but WTF? Excuse me?

My brain is a mystery. Even to me.

* * *
Around ten p.m. or so, J got home and brought dinner with him. He’d been at a meeting for some new circus they’re trying to get started here in Omaha, and it ran way later than he thought it would.

I didn’t hear him come in. I was there, in the kitchen. But I didn’t hear him come in. I was stirring oil.

And, incidentally, had popped the headphones on the iPhone and cued up “Comin’ Back” by Citizen Cope, and…uh….might have been dancing. A little.

Okay, fine. I was dancing my ass off. Pantsless. Eyes closed. Spoon still in my hand. Elbow-length rubber gloves on. (Yellow ones, if that helps the visual.) Giant purple sweater hanging off one shoulder like a housewife’s parody of Flashdance. I’d been at it for a while, too, so I was covered in sweat and dirt and probably a fair bit of coconut oil.

I spun around, singing along, and opened my eyes to J standing there with a bag of Taco Bueno in his hands and four sets of dog-eyes surrounding him (from the tacos, not my charming performance), with his mouth half-open and a look of serious incredulity on his face.

He barely missed a beat, though, before holding up the bag and saying, in all seriousness, “Taco?”

Now these? These are the moments, fifty years from now, that I’m going to remember. I’m just sayin’.

I think it took us ten minutes to get up off the floor from all the laughing.

Hey…it’s a really good song.

* * *
I found this quote I wanted to share, from the blog Bluebonnets and Buffalo Grass. (I found her in my referrer log, and even though I’m not all that into genealogy, I was really into the way she writes.) She has it in her sidebar, and I can see why:

“We inherit from our ancestors gifts so often taken for granted… Each of us contains within… this inheritance of soul. We are links between the ages, containing past and present expectations, sacred memories and future promise.” -Edward Sellner

I love that. Sacred memories and future promise. Inheritance of soul.
Beautiful. Just beautiful.

* * *
Tomorrow, it’s back to the Focus practice. One thing at a time until it’s done, even if that “done” is just part of a thing. (Like today, three repeats on a scarf was what I wanted to get done, and I did. I consider that done.)

I feel like as long as things are changing — and they’re a-gonna change — I might as well use this chance to rebuild myself the right way this time. Actually be what I want to be, do what I want to do, live the way I want to live.

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure that out, or that it took this kind of a life change to do it.

And I can’t wait to see where I’m intended to end up. Even if that’s dancing half-naked with an oily spoon for an audience of One.

(p.s. Tomorrow, don’t let me forget to tell you about the retreat I’m planning for myself when I hit NC on the fifteenth. I’m chuffed.)

Today has been one of those unintentionally awesome days.

See, we’ve got Weather today.  Capital W.  The kind where icy death rains down from above and freezes, turning all of the roads and sidewalks and trees and everything into nature’s very own skating rink of doom and destruction.  I’d had plans to hit my work stuff pretty hard in the morning, then skeedaddle off into town to give myself a (much-needed, and, dare I say, much-deserved) break for the afternoon.  But by noon, it was becoming fairly apparent that getting in the car and making it go anywhere was going to be a Very Bad Idea.  Like, bad bad.

The news was reporting accidents on just about all the major freeways.  I-80 was down to a standstill in places, while emergency crews tried to clean up the mess of folks who just couldn’t stay home.  Weather.com warned that travel was not recommended.  (No kidding.  Really?  It’s not recommended to drive on a sheet of ice?  No way.  /end sarcasm.)

Not being one to buck the system when the system comes with a two-inch ice coating (like pre-frozen chicken breasts or something), I gave up on going Out, with a fair bit of bitterness.  Sure.  The ONE DAY I actually WANT to leave the house….Mother Nature decides to spring Teh Evil on us.  Thanks.  Thanks for that, Ma.

So now I had an entire afternoon cleared, a good four shots of Starbucks under my belt, and not a thing to do with it.  This dawned on me while I was letting the dogs out (and watching them skate across the “lawn”, completely confused by this whole Ice Thing), and I couldn’t decide whether to start dancing or have a panic attack.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to stay busy.  It’s like I have this pathological fear of being bored.  I’m pretty sure that’s why I surround myself with five zillion things to do, and get myself into an infinite number of Very Big Projects simultaneously.  It keeps me from ever being bored.  (At this point, I might add, I could live to be four thousand, eight hundred and twenty six, and still never have a moment’s boredom.  It’s an irrational fear.)

I flipped through all the mental channels of things I could do, and the little rolodex-o-projects was flipping at lightspeed when I happened to notice that my kitchen…?  Disaster.

Not that this is news.  Not to me, probably not to you, either, dear reader.  This whole past month, I’ve been away.  And as I’m the only one who ever cleans the kitchen, it’s been slowly accumulating a crazy amount of clutter that’s…well…kind of colossal.  I do a pretty good job of just ignoring it most of the time.  It’s not like I eat here at the moment.  One would require groceries, and that would require leaving the house, and THAT would require both a) being in the state, which has been rare, and b) a roadway that isn’t covered with frozen death.  But I digress.

A few days ago, I announced to the Happy Housewife customers that I was going to be phasing soap out of the HH line.  Not because I don’t like making it (I do), or because it’s not selling (it is), but because it tends to take forever to make (in comparison with the other stuff I do).  The other, unspoken reason is that it takes up an INSANE amount of kitchen real-estate.  No, seriously.  We’re talking IN. SANE.   I’d take pictures, but they’d scare you.  THAT insane.  And I have a *really* big kitchen, so for me to even notice how much space it takes?  You know it’s a lot.

(Granted, I tend to buy supplies by the drum, which is kind of insane in general for anything other than a production operation, but I don’t do things half-way.  Ever.  Go figure.)

Long story short, while attempting to rearrange said supplies to make them less of a distraction (DO NOT LOOK AT THE MOUNTAIN OF COCOA BUTTER BEHIND THE CURTAIN…), the bug struck me, and I thought I’d make a batch of soap or two.  Hot process, so I didn’t have active lye sitting around to cure.  Plus, I thought, it’s quicker, and I can use up some of these scents I blended that weren’t perfumey enough to be skin oils….blah blah blah.  My brain came up with quite a few Really Good Reasons to just play with oil for a while, actually.

A few hours later…

soap bricks

Soap bricks.  A few of them, at least.  A very, very bad picture, due to the world’s crappiest lighting at 10 p.m. (one of my overheads is being rebuilt after, I kid you not, lighting on fire.  Why do I live here again? Ah, that’s right.  Project House.), which doesn’t even remotely show the right colors, but you get the gist.  Soap.  Lots and lots of soap.

Each one of those bricks is roughly a dozen bars, give or take.  And I have, like, ten of them.  Apparently, when my mind gets on something, it really gets on it.

(Of course, the downside to this bit of productive glee is that I used none of the supplies that I was stacking and cleaning and reorganizing.  This all came from a batch of oils that I’d mastered a few months back that had been waiting patiently for me to use them.  I haven’t touched the reserves yet.  Insert a nice little facepalm here, and know that if you were one of the ones who was worried that the soap was going away before you could get some?  I’ll be making it until the supplies run out.  Which, at this rate, should be, oh, say, around 2090.)

Now that you know what I’ve been doing all day, here’s what I actually wanted to talk about:

When you’re making soap, there’s a time when you have to pay attention.  Acute, pointed, focused attention.  Ask me sometime about the giant crater in my foot where I wasn’t paying attention to the active lye that was sloshed all over my foot, in fact.  VERY close attention.

Once that attention’s spent, though, there’s a fair bit of time where you’re just waiting.   Waiting for the stuff to cook.  Waiting for it to dry in the molds.  Waiting for it to cure a bit more so you can hack it into bars.  You’re just waiting.

Granted, I tend to fill up those waiting minutes pretty easily, but with today being A Day Off and all, I had to really try to disconnect from all the things that I should be doing, and ended up trying to figure out what I wanted to be doing instead.  I knit for a while on the malabrigo scarf (leftover yarn from a gift-knit from earlier last month, which is awesome in and of itself — easy projects AND using up the stash…all in one!  wooot!).  I flipped through Marie Claire Idees.  Petted the dogs an insane amount.  Tried cleaning out the sink, even.

Sidenote:  Have I mentioned our water here?  How it’s actually orange?  All the rust is at levels that just plain aren’t healthy.  (I use bottled for the soap, by the way.  Otherwise, it’d all be orangey-rusty-brown.) For example, I cleaned out the sink with some kind of heavy-duty acid stuff just before I left the second time for North Carolina.  Which was what?  Two weeks ago or so?  Maybe three?  Um.  Yeah.  Lookie:

The top part’s the part I’d just re-cleaned with the same acid stuff.  The bottom part is how it looks after two weeks of regular use.  And it doesn’t drip.  It’s just icky.

So now that I’ve scared y’all sufficiently enough to go clean your own sinks out of some kind of empathetic pang, I’ve digressed again.  (Which actually works right into all this quite nicely as a segue.)

All this relaxing left me with some time to think again.  (Which, I realize, I should probably not give myself.  Because I either end up with Ideas, or I end up going around in circles, which is what I did today, in fact.)

I envy people with focus.  Focus and simplicity and some kind of general ease in life.  I’ve tried to emulate them, when I’ve found them, even.  People who have one idea about what they should do with their lives and do it, and only it.  People who have one project who work on that project until it’s done, and then start another one.  (Or, in a related example, people who work on a project and don’t buy supplies for seven zillion more while they’re working on that one, and then don’t worry that they’re a little schizo about what to do next because of the myriad choices they’re now faced with.  Sheesh.)  People, even really busy people, who can concentrate on one thing at a time, all the way though, no matter what they’re multitasking.

I have this vision, see.  This notion that they all live in perfectly clean little houses with organized storage spaces and one book on the nightstand that they’re reading all the way through (and will then donate to the local library before they buy a new one), a bunch of finished knitwear because they’ve only spent time on one at a time, and a perfectly calm demeanor because they know what they’re supposed to do next and know what they’re doing now.

And I TOTALLY HATE THEM a little bit, these little perfect mind-people.  It’s so totally opposite of the way I do things, that I WANT THAT.  (Yes, all-caps.  I ALLCAPS want that.)

Since I was just a little sprog, I always wanted this little teeny house somewhere.  Preferably a beach somewhere, but that was before I discovered mountains.  The vision morphed after that to a mountain cabin.  But the house was the same.  Tiny.  White.  Shutters.  Red front door.  Possibly a fence.  Enchanted-cottage-like, with a fireplace in the tiny little front room and all white and wood on the inside.  Just me and a dog and (at the time) all the books I was writing.  (Now it’d be stuff I’m knitting one at a time, but that goes without saying.)  Big windows and white gauzy curtains.  A garden out back that I didn’t kill (for a change).  Flowers out front.  Wood floors and really cool rugs and maybe even some white sparkly lights in the bedroom, because OMG, white sparkly string lights are cool when you’re eight.

The only way something like that would work now is if I radically changed the way I was doing things.  No more stashes.  No more stockpiling for the coming revolution (apparently).  No more of this buying-of-the-books as if tomorrow, paper would disappear.  And the business would have to be Elsewhere, because right now, there are something like a thousand bottles of base oils in my kitchen (no kidding), not to mention all the little bottles and the labels and the supplies for mixing and, as mentioned before, the seven ZILLION POUNDS of stuff for soap.  (And that’s not even getting into what it takes to dye yarn.  Which is also considerably-sized.  Trust me here.)

I’m at a place in my life where I have the ability to re-evaluate the way I’m doing things.  The way I’m living.  The way I want to go, versus where I’m at.   Radical changes are going to happen, and if they’re going to happen anyway, I might as well be a little bit self-directed about where those things change.

I may never be able to take a day off and work on the one knitting project I have on the needles, using the five balls of yarn in my house (there are something like eight-hundred-and-forty, even AFTER getting rid of so much over the last year that entire FLOCKS of sheep are naked because of me.  Just sayin’.).  Or pick up the one book I own and read it.  Or, for that matter, know exactly what I’m doing with my life because it’s all I’m doing.

But I can work toward it.  I can change my habits in tiny little ways.  Consume less.  Work on one thing at a time.  Decide what I need to be doing and how I can do it.  I can take a look at my life from a distance, as if I’m looking down on what I’m doing from high, high above, and try to be more objective about the way I’m living, even if I’m not quite there yet.

All I really know is that I’ll be keeping my eye open for an enchanted cottage with wood floors, close to some kind of warehouse with hookups for electricity and a sink and an oven.

Just in case.

RESOLVED:

I wrote this whole big THING here last night.  Like, two thousand words (and counting, as it wasn’t quite done yet when I paused to record an episode of L&V with Carin) all about 2008.  And it was helpful to write.  To review, to look back before moving forward, to see how much of the map I’ve covered before planning the route for twenty-oh-nine.

In the interest of brevity, however, I’m deleting all that.  Summing it all up in a succinct (for me) little nugget of What I Learned.

2008, to the outside world looking in on my life, probably looks like a little bit of a nightmare.  Illness and surgery.  A little bit of strife.  Dead friends and a whole lotta guilt.  Strayings from course.  Failed projects that never got off the ground.  Frustrations at home.  A fair bit of avoidance, and a couple things that I never even bothered to talk about, since OMG, the whining could have been considerable.

But here’s the deal:

I love 2008.  I think, in the grand scheme of things, as I’m looking back over my life when I’m old and grey and happy….(er….oldER, and greyER, and I’m always happy.  But you know what I mean.)…I’m going to see 2008 as one  of those Pivotal Years.  Those years where things sat on a fulcrum that took a 90-degree-turn for the better.  Where all those little seeds of things I’d been working on and playing with and learning about came together and, with the assistance of a fair bit of divine intervention, kicked it all up a notch.

To paraphrase myself in the Long and Deleted Babble of New Year’s Eve ‘08:

The first half of ‘08 was punctuated by two things — a feeling that something was about to happen, and a whole lot of unexplained illness, that was eventually explained by one tiny little vestigal organ and removed.  Well, the illness was explained.  The feeling remained.  As much as I hated going under the knife, I hated the subsequent downtime even more, since being busy is kind of important to me.  Feels like I’m doing something that way, even if that something is just being busy.

That downtime, though, gave me the mental and physical space to relax about some of Teh Busy, and let my brain have the room to think, finally.  (I used to get a lot of time to think back in the Seattle days, because when you’re putting one foot in front of the other on a forested path to find a letterbox or something, it’s not like you can work.  Brain eventually unties from the knots as your muscles start to burn, the oxygen starts getting to the greymeats for some clarity, and THAT little side-effect was something I really DO miss, though it’s not Seattle-specific.  The trails are re-calling me.  I digress.)

Out of that illness and surgery and subsequent mutant flu, however, came the synthesis of about a zillion different interests and ideas.  Intention Yarns were born from that downtime, and so was Happy Housewife Soap.  (So were a few other things.  We’ll get to that.)  Those two things, all by their little lonesome, even while they were just words on a page, were a seed of sorts for me.  And it never would have happened if I hadn’t had the involuntary downtime to just sit outside in an adirondack chair watching the breeze move the trees and thinking about seemingly unrelated things.

Second half of 2008 moved like a blur.  I’m still finding myself a little surprised that it’s not still July.

See, along with the two big ‘uns, there were more ideas.  (I know, this is no surprise to anyone who knows me.  The ideas are plentiful.  The time to implement them is what’s at a premium.)  And I did pick a few to play with, just to see how they’d go.  Not to mention that personally, there were some things going on in the background that were full-on distractions, and probably related to this belief I had that I was just in the wrong place altogether.  (Not that this was new, either, but the way I dealt with it, allowing some things to happen that were a little against-type for me, trying to fit myself into a paradigm that wasn’t quite in-line with the principles by which I attempt to live my life when I can….just not so good.)

The Great Virus Caper of 2008, when the SQL attack thing happened, was a bit of a wake-up call, too.  From the outside, it looked like unmitigated disaster.  Five sites, one database (since fixed), one very nasty bit of self-replicating code that did an immense amount of damage, both to my own stuff *and* to random internet visitors….?  Hideous.  Eye-meltingly bad.  Totally beyond my own scope to deal with.  (I don’t do SQL.  Wouldn’t know a SQL database from a rabid platypus, if it wasn’t for the foaming duckbill.  It was bad.)

BUT…and this is a huge BUT, here….if it hadn’t happened, we would have launched the second podcast.  Scratch & Sniff was ready to go.  Edited.  Awaiting music.  Ready. To. Go.  The site was building nicely, we were getting some interaction even pre-launch, and things were ramping up fabulously.  Until the message boards started making cockroaches eat the browser windows of most visitors.  (*facepalm*)

And here’s the deal:  If it had launched, there would have been no time for anything else.  Not a single thing.  No IntentionYarns, no Happy Housewife, nothing.  Because running a podcast, despite how easy some people make it look or make it sound, takes an inordinately large amount of time. Seriously.  It’s not HARD, per se.  But it IS time-consuming if it’s done right.  And I try to do things right.

Especially in the beginning phases, when you have to build brand awareness (to use a dry, vaguely jargony word for it).  When people are just discovering your stuff, you have to work really hard at being out there and accessible and authoritative.  (Or, in the case of L&V, being out there and accessible and crazy, but that was much easier for me, since I kinda *am* crazy.)  It’s not unrealistic to expect to spend 10 hours producing the show and another 60 every week getting out there to promote it in various ways, or to do upkeep on the community it creates.  It’s an insane amount of time.

Again, I digress.  I do that when talking about this kinda thing.  (I’m a community/marketing geek.  Obviously.)

My point here is that S&S, for all intents and purposes, ended up being a resounding flop.  Not because people didn’t like it, but because we couldn’t even get it out there for people not to like.  Technology failed in a big way, and by the time I got that fixed (through the glorious Dani, who is my favorite person *ever* for that), I’d realized that if I was going to get ANYTHING else done, EVER, it just couldn’t be birthed at that time.  What looked like a really BAD thing was actually a blessing in disguise, even if it was wearing virus-tainted blankets and made me wish to get hit by a bus.

The hot months slid slowly into autumn, and as Intention Yarns and the sniffies were gaining momentum (because, and I’m sure of this, it’s what I’m supposed to be doing.), the whole internal battle I’ve been fighting for a few years also started snowballing.  I was letting go of quite a few things, making a lot of realizations about who I am and what I’m capable of, and impressing the crap out of myself with regards to focus and drive.  I’ve always been ambitious.  (I mean, really — when people ask what I do, I tell them I’m a rock star for knitters, intent on taking over the world.  Ambitious much?)  But a lot of my limits were challenged over and over again this year, and I floundered through them.  But I got through them.  Moved on.  Moved upward.  Kept going.

And made a whole lot of decisions.  Cleared out a lot of the mental shelves and the physical ones, too, while I was at it.  Met new people, made new connections, started deciding that I decide where I’m going to go with this, not some external factor beyond my control.

Better, I have a vision of what I’d like that to look like, even if I don’t have a clue what the steps are to get from here to there.  I know I need to move and change my current situation.  I know I need to do certain things to maintain some stuff.  I know that I’m handed, on a daily basis, extraordinary opportunities because of what I’ve already done, and that if I keep seeing the bigger picture, those opportunities are just going to keep happening.

There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done.  Personally, professionally….everything.  A lot of things I need to learn, a few I need to catch up on, things I’m going to fail miserably at and things that are going to go through the roof when I’m not looking.

I’m up for it, though.

2008 has been one of those pivotal years.  The years where the seeds are planted, the framework’s been laid, and the ideas generated.  2009 is likely a workhorse year — putting all those things into play that started in 2008, and evolving them into the next steps.  I’m okay with that, and moreover, I’m so ready for the challenge.

The next few days are days of planning for me.  I’ve got enough of my life into systems now that I’m seeing the light at the end of that particularly disorganized tunnel, and things are looking much, much clearer.  Even the things I really don’t have a lot of control over don’t seem as scary, because really?  If I’m stepping up to the challenges as they come, and just getting through them, I’m already half-way there, even if my knees are knocking the whole time.

It might not be where I thought I’d go, or with whom I thought I’d be sharing it, or in the way I thought I’d get there….but I’m headed toward where I’m supposed to be.

I have all the faith in the world on that point.

* * *

And if you’ve made it this far, I have a little thing I wanted to share with y’all.

Last year, I found the blog of Buster McLeod.  I’ve known of him in various circles off and on for the past zillion years (or at least almost the last decade), from the days of SeattleStories through his fabulous 43Things launch and onward, into the Buster years.  I think we’ve actually talked directly once or twice when I was getting ready to move to Seattle (where he’s from), but he’s always been one of those people (at least from a distance, as I don’t know him, really) about whom you could just tell.  You could see the creativity and drive in him that comes from a clarity of purpose, even if he seemed a little random.

I found him again last year, when I was looking for the old SeattleStories site — I had a few things up over there, and was wanting to nab them for my own archives, and one link led to another (the way hypretext tends to do), and I ended up on his blog, where he listed his 12 step manifesto.

I IMMEDIATELY printed it out.  Copied it all into my journals and nodded along so vigorously that I thought I might actually give myself some kind of herniated disc if I wasn’t careful.  All 12 of his items were Great Big Important Things that, while I never really articulated or collected them, were the exact way I’d been trying to live my life.  At the beginning of 2008, when I found his manifesto, I was in dire need of a reminder of a few of them, and the resulting psychic smack across the back of the head was enough to jar me out of the single-minded rut into which I’d been putting myself.

For the record, here are the 12 things, faithfully reproduced, so that they might inspire you.  Go see Buster’s site for more.

I have a manifesto of 12 things you can do to make your life more interesting. They are:

1. You must not dilly-dally.
2. You must be your word.
3. You must have good intentions.
4. You must admit to being the maker of meaning.
5. You must not feel sorry for yourself.
6. You must have a vision that you are striving for.
7. You must tie creativity and experimentation with survival.
8. You must be the change.
9. You must rally others with your vision.
10. You must stake your reputation on your better self.
11. You must be responsible for your own failure and success.
12. You must becomfortable with big failure.

I’m still working on that whole “not dilly-dallying” thing from time to time, but everything else?  That’s me.  That’s my highest self, at least, even when I’m off wallowing in the details and getting bogged down in my own brain.  The part of me that knows what it’s doing has those 12 things tattooed right on its ass.

Just sayin’.

(And no, I’m not planning on making that a physical reality any time soon, either.  Can’t do tattoos, y’know.)

This is an epic entry.  Sorry for that, folks.  I know bloggybits are supposed to be all concise and easy to read, and possibly even just 142 characters.  But this is where I work out my thoughts.  Synthesize everything I’m thinking into coherency.  Get a handle on the Now, so I can think about other things.

Thanks for being here.  Thanks for 2008.  Thanks for listening and supporting all the crazy stuff I get myself into.  For the comments and the questions and the email and the advice and the cheerleading.  (Even when I’m roughly nine months’ worth of backlogged on my personal emails.)

I appreciate you all so much.

I appreciate life so much.

2009 is going to rock.

I’m not sure what’s gotten into me today.  Maybe it’s all the productivity, which has been voluminous and much-flurried in activity.  Things getting tossed out.  Systems being created.  Asking for (gasp) help with things that  I had no business thinking I could do all on my own in the first place.  Organizing.  Scheduling.  Recording things that I had recorded on less-than-stable legs.

Or it could be because I stayed up way, way too late last night.  Fell asleep while talking to a friend, in fact.  One minute I was wrapped up in a blanket having a conversation, and the next, it was morning.  Bluetooth makes things so hands-free that my brain apparently went off on its own, too.  (Still had to get up around 7, which is late for me, but was only about 3 hours of solid sleep.)

Whatever the factors involved, for some reason, today’s been full of a brain-load of introspection.  And not the typical looking-over-your-life introspection, either.  The bizarre kind, where your mind fixates on one little thing you’ve seen or heard and turns it into THE most INTERESTING THING on the entire PLANET.

For me, today, that thing was maps.

But not just any maps.  If I was getting all introspective and mind-crunchy about an atlas or something, I’d gladly check myself into some kind of outpatient program that serves rice krispies without a spoon, but that wasn’t where I went with it.

See, I’m working on this project.  This big, huge, FUN project.  It’s going to change the way I do things even further, and make life a little more fun for everyone who plays along (and possibly just people who bop along to read it and don’t get involved).  I know.  That’s all kind of vague and such, but trust me.  It’s freakin’ exciting.

In this project, there is a map.  And not just any kind of map, either.  It’s an interactive map that serves as navigation and a prettybit all on its own.  And it’s kind of central to the project.

So somehow, my mind focused on that one little tiny aspect of it — the map as navigation.  Which spawned a whole lot of brain-vulturing on the topic of perceptual mapmaking.  How your perceptions of a place can tailor how you learn to react to things.  How you have your own internal navigation that guides you through life, and how your map thereof is entirely subjective and perceptual.

It really did go on from there.  All morning, I felt half-tranced and kind of out of it, as I tried to write about Completely Different Things, and ended up spacing off and thinking of some new aspect of this relationship between people and the spaces they occupy  (and, moreover, how that would affect the way a person perceives the contextual navigation on, say, a web page.).  My. brain. is. weird.

Right around ten a.m., I was hit with a particular kind of melancholy.  There’s a word for it, but as of the time of this writing, I still haven’t found that word by definition, even with my Very Strong Google-Fu.  It’s a non-English word, which doesn’t help matters any, and I know I wrote it down once, if I can just find that particular bit of paper in the stacks left to go through.

The word’s definition, though, is a melancholy bordering on nostalgia for something that has never been, or a place where the one feeling the emotion has never been, possibly a place that never existed.  Like some of the RennFaire freaks I know that actually talk about Avalon as if it’s their summer residence.  (Oh, come *on*.  You know them, too, if you’re a faire-goer.  Stop with the being offended, if you’re a FaireWench….I’m not talking about *you*.  I’m talking about the ones that freak *you* out.  You know the ones.)

But, really, here I was, with this particularly strange and illogical emotion out of the blue.  All I really wanted to do was run off with a group of Really Smart People and sit in a coffee shop somewhere drinking pitch-black coffee and smoking unfiltered cigarettes until 2 a.m., talking about the disconnect between people and the spaces they inhabit.

Better yet, I knew at the time that I wasn’t looking for some kind of intellectual discourse (though, god knows, I’m not going to get it in this house.  The dogs have not yet read Kirkegaard, despite my best efforts to get them interested.), I was looking for something deeper.  A connection.  A sense that someone would follow my out-of-control thought-trains and get them safely back to the station because they would get it.  They’d know what I meant when I started using camels and poodles in a bizarre analogy, and have something fairly enlightening to say back to me.

Really, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m having nostalgic longings for a good old-fashioned Salon-type-thing.  Gather the brilliant.  Put them in a room with some coffee.  See what happens.  See who leaves that night and creates some kind of poetry or art piece or novel based on the night’s conversation.

It’d be freakin’ awesome.  (And none of those people, I might add, would want to hang out with me.  I really *do* use poodles for analogies.  I’ve resisted here thusfar, but only to spare y’all from the full brunt of my own brand of Crazy.)

In the end, the feeling eventually went away.  I worked on the Project some more, wrote up scent descriptions and made two new ones based on stories and snippets that I wrote hastily into Evernote the other night  (I start with a story I want to tell, then I add oils until it has a scent that reflects the soul of what I’m trying to say.  Which sounds pretentious.  It is.  I’m okay with that.).  I slowly turned off my brain (with no small amount of effort, I might add), and did what you’re supposed to do — focused.  Focused on work, on being awake and present in my own life.  On connecting with those standing right here in front of me, even if they don’t like wearing tweed blazers with leather elbow-patches.

I’m okay with that, too.

It’s late again, and I still have about an hour’s worth of work to do before I can sleep without guilt.  I’m kind of weighing now whether I want to deal with The Tired or deal with The Guilt, and the burden of guilt is looking easier all the time.  I’m still behind — in so, so many areas of my life — but I’m reminding myself that I’m catching up, step by step.

After all, the only reason I had the free mental-space to run and frolic with the imaginary intelligentia at all is because I’m getting caught up.  That brain cell would otherwise have been holding “take out the trash and make fifty more Last Kiss cupcakes before dinner” information.

Can’t wait to see what this brain of mine will come up with tomorrow.

We’ll see.

I’ve been in the weirdest mental place all afternoon.  It’s like I’m orbiting some kind of planet that I know I shouldn’t land on, so I keep *almost* touching down and skimming back up to where work and all the Good Stuff is.  But the gravity….the gravity.

Which is just a very convoluted way of saying, really, that I’m doing a whole lot of evaluation of some things, trying to get my brain all straight and in-line, but the temptation to wallow in some unfinished business is pretty strong.

So what’s a girl to do when she can’t quite turn off her own mind’s theatrics?

Knit, apparently.

Little Grey Cat Designs (Maggie) sent me this fabulous handspun yarn the other day to test out and talk about.  It had been unwrapped for less than three hours, and the supreme squishiness of the superbulky stuff kept helping me skim back away from the Evil Bad FeelingThing Planet’s surface, so I grabbed a pair of size 15s (it’s really bulky), and cast on 10 stitches and just started knitting.  It’s technically the Yarn Harlot’s one row scarf pattern, done really thin, since this is a really big yarn.  (It’s still about 5″ wide, though you can’t tell that from the photo, really.)

An hour later, I had no more yarn and a completed scarf.

Nothing like an instant gratification project to tow your brain away from Planet Ick.

***

I’m SUPPOSED to be doing some strategic planning today.  Coming up with all the plans for the year, both personally and professionally (in two different capacities, even).  I do something similar every year — get out a giant roll of paper and make a wall-sized chart of all the things I’m doing.  I use a whole lot of sharpies and make this ginormous flow-chart lookin’ thing that I typically have on my wall.  It’s a companion to that Visioning Exercise that I talked about in June — that’s more words, this is more pictures, or at least more graphic, like a road map.

In June, I was already feeling a little blank.  I had an idea where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure what it would look like when I got there.  This freaked me out a bit — I ALWAYS know what my life’s going to look like.   I might be totally wrong — the world might have something altogether different in mind for me and I might end up a far cry from what that initial vision looked like, but I always know.  And I didn’t.  I was pretty blank, beyond the basic I-wanna-be-here-and-doing-this kind of thing.

Things changed a lot during the second half of ‘08.  Some of it was planned; some of it a complete surprise.  Winds blew, leaves fell into coffee cups, I took vacations, and here we are.  But where is that, exactly?  And do I want to be here, working my proverbial ass off to get to a future that might not be the one I want?

Generally speaking, I dive into things way faster than other people do.  (Ask poor Adminnie about “I have this idea…”, which gives her eye an actual twitch when it’s said.  I need to bake her some extra cookies.  Soaked in rum.)  And I’ve never once, even with all the crazy, stupid stuff I’ve done in my life (and OMG IS THAT LIST CONSIDERABLY SIZED), ever ever ever not had a safety net appear.  Even when stuff was so far off the wall that even *I* sat back later and looked around and wondered who sold me to the circus when I wasn’t looking, I always knew who I was and where I was supposed to be, excepting a few brief bouts here and there where, honestly, I lost myself in an image of what I thought I should be versus what I was.   (That doesn’t really happen so much anymore, now that I’m older and have a better handle on that whole subject.  I might be easily impressionable, but I know who I am.)

Which, through empirical data-testing, then…I shouldn’t be worried about whatever it is that I decide to do from now on.  If I leap, I’m jumping exactly where I should be.  Even if it doesn’t make sense sometimes, or to some people.  Even if it doesn’t necessarily make all that much sense to me.  The way becomes clear only when you’re on it, holding the candle.

These diagrams and flow charts and words and such…they all have the purpose of attempting to be the candle.  To map out that way I’m jumping.  So I’m not sure why I keep drawing a blank, unless there’s somthing in there in the little twisty annals of my brainmaze that I’m not seeing.  Or not acknowledging.  One of the two.

Back to the floor, then, with me and the Sharpies.

Maybe I’ll light a candle.  Or knit another scarf.

Something’s bound to help.

This bit of organizational craziness (or DISorganizational craziness, as the case may be…) has been my morning.

I know, I know.  I’m blowing my own image here a little bit.  I’m okay with that.  This particular mess is temporary, and necessary.  (The rest of the house..?  THAT, we’re not going into.  I’ll get there.)

I’m really not sure what’s gotten into me for the past two days.  (Okay, yes, I know what it is.  Read the last post.  It’s that.)  I’m one of those people who’s very, very into the IDEA of organization.  I try a lot of different things to make my life easier, and, generally speaking, they fail.  Bigtime.  For a couple reasons:

1.  I have a tendency to ignore my collection systems.  Not intentionally, but because my Mac can’t travel with me everywhere, so when I’m downstairs or (gasp) out of the house, I have index cards.  And while index cards were working for me for a while, the fact that I’m now effectively juggling enough projects and stuff for four or five whole *lives*, keeping the cards from getting scattered and/or out of order was becoming problematic.  I’d grab the wrong card stack, go out to a meeting, and be utterly screwed.  So I kinda stopped using those, too, for a while there.  Ideas were on scraps of paper, in various notebooks, and in at least one case, written on my *hand*.  Not overly effective, especially since I’m fond of soap.

2.  Once things were collected, they were a giant bitch to go through.  Pardon my french.  But seriously, here.  Oh. Em. Gee.

and

3.  I didn’t have an effective scheduling system.  I also didn’t have an effective to-do list type system that was complete, since my collection of all the General Stuff To Do rarely made it INTO the to-do-list systems, due to the extreme amounts of varied and sundry effluvia that made its way onto those index cards.  Lots of stuff to reference later, but no real way to FIND it when it came time to USE it.

In other words, I’ve been a giant slacker, just kind of floating on through life, doing whatever thing was most on-fire at the time.

Now, granted:  I’m pretty productive.  This system of non-system has worked just fine for me, for the most part.  Things have been falling through the cracks here and there, but I try to be a little gentle on myself about it.  Mostly because I really *am* trying to do too much in a day, and I know this.  But there’s me, and there’s Adminnie, and we’re just two people.  Period.  We occasionally have minions who come to help out, but for the most part, it’s just us.  (And, due to my System of Non-System-ing, when the minions *do* come, sometimes I don’t even know what to have them help with.  This is Not Good.)

Now, though, with all the crazy stuff going on in my life, all the new additions and this sudden streak of wanting to, oh, say, actually know where I’m going and being accountable for what I’m doing for the first time in forever (first time not working for just *me* in a long time now, I might add, so I’m a little out of my element), and knowing that my body isn’t going to take much more of this floundering-around-and-working-eighteen-hours-a-day thing  (I’m almost 40.  It’s time.)….I needed something.

Enter my best. purchase. evar.

The iPhone.

Did you hear that?  The faint sound of an angelic chorus singing as the clouds overhead break wide open and stream shafts of sunlight onto the Apple Headquarters?  That’s Steve Jobs getting his wings.  I shall knit him a wing-cozy.

Honestly, I bought the iPhone for one, singular reason.  I have a person I talk to for exceedingly long amounts of time every day (bestest. friend. ever.) and he’s got one.  Calling from iPhone to iPhone is free, and the long distance charges were starting to have to be brought in by pack mule.  I figured even at the relatively high monthly cost of it, I’d still be saving money by the truckload.  (Which I have.  Beside the point.)  I’m also a giant Mac-freak, but again, that’s beside the point.  I didn’t really think I *needed* a cell phone, since I rarely leave the house, and all that app nonsense was all greek to me.  Why would you use your *phone* to play the ocarina?  I didn’t get it.

And I reiterate: Oh. Em. Gee.

I totally get it now.

I’ve been underutilizing the technology available to me.  I admit this freely, obviously.  I use my iCal, but not very much (google calendar gets used more often, honestly, since before this, it was easier to access from anywhere), and I was using 30boxes.com for shared calendar-ing, but not very well.  I’ve tried just about every blessed to-do list program out there, but all of them kinda pissed me off, largely because I wasn’t using them right.  (see above about data collection.  duh.  I also freely admit that the error there is between the keyboard and the chair, and the error was doing all the typing, or lack thereof in this case.)

So I found iPhone apps.  Downloaded a few.  Played a whole lot of Bejeweled on the plane home from North Carolina.  Still didn’t click.

Then, from above, the light broke and understanding streamed down.   I found ToodleDo, and made a few list items.  Liked the way you had multiple options for scheduling.  Hmm.  Started scheduling everything through iCal again, because it synchs right up with my phone.  Discovered Evernote for taking pictures of diagrams and sketches and such, as well as typing in random text notes.  Found iTalk for taking text notes while driving.  Downloaded iOwn for keeping inventories of yarn and sniffies so I don’t double-buy anything (and for keeping track of my base oils, so I have that info with me wherever I go, which is INSANELY helpful for when I’m either placing orders, or coming up with ideas for scents on the fly and need to know what I have on-hand with which to create said scent.)  I even found a freakin’ knitting counter program that saves where I’m at in any pattern as I’m working through it.  Seriously helpful.

And I have it all with me all the time.  They all have a web component that backs it all up, not to mention Apple’s brilliant backup system built right in.  I’m not worried I’ll lose anything like I was with lists and cards.  And I can access my googledocs if I need to for longer text copy-pasting right into my Evernote.

I’m sure this is all about as exciting to y’all as watching paint dry.  But for me, it’s like this huge revelation, replete with ambrosia and honey mead and a few saints doing the tap-dance on the head of a very big clue-by-four.  Duh Moment x10.

Yesterday and today have been all about the re-visiting of all my data, then.  I have, literally, a couple *thousand* bits of to-dos, ideas, sketches and notes on various cards and notescraps all over the place.  It’s a huge huge HUGE job to go through all of these and put them into some kind of order.  Huge.  Eye-gougingly huge.  But the way it’s all coming together — reference stuff and ideas on Evernote, action lists on Toodledo, everything scheduled out in iCal so I don’t go completely batshitcrazyinsane with it all…?

Working. like. a. charm.

(And now, the more organized among us are all doing the Happy Duh Dance, and probably laughing and pointing.  Go right ahead.  I deserve it here.)

I don’t feel nearly as overwhelmed with the idea of strategic planning for the upcoming Life Changes and Work Stuff as I did before, because I know where everything is.  Granted, the downside is that I know where everything is, and I know exactly how insane I was to take on this much stuff.  But honestly, it’s not as bad as I feared it might be, and I know what, if anything, I can delegate or delete now.

It’s freakin’ awesome.  Seriously.

(And, parenthetically, because apparently I’m all about the parenthetical in this entry — I’m clearing out literal STACKS of clutter that have been here for a long time, waiting for my attention.  It’s all distilled down into this one little technological square the size of one index card, and OMG DO I LOVE THAT.  Also, since I know better what I need and what I don’t, I’m less likely to hold on to EVERYTHING “just in case”.  I can totally smell the Zen from here.)

I’m gonna need a smaller purse.  Wallet, iPhone, keys, lip balm.  That’s all I need now.  It’s kinda scary.  One good-sized pocket’ll do me now.

Now I’m wondering what else I can digitize and get out of here.  Knitting books with one pattern I like?  Photo the pattern and give it away to someone who likes all the patterns.  The giant stack of recipes (both scent recipes and food recipes)…could be gone.  More counter space = a good thing.  That kinda stuff.  I have the ability now to do all my small things more effectively, and might actually clean my house once in a while with all the free time.

I’m such a geek.

Only now, I’m an *organized* geek, with a purpose and a good to-do list.

Merry Christmas, folks.

I just got back yesterday from what turned into a 28-hour-trek across the country in a rented Caliber (in bright monkey-ass blue, no less) from the middle of North Carolina back to Iowa.  For those who follow this saga elsewhere, this is the second time I’ve been there in just about as many weeks (been there two of the past three weeks), because honestly?  I got home and realized that Home had up and moved on me when I wasn’t looking.

There’s been that subtle perception shift thing going on in my life for the past 18 months or so.  As things have heated up, business-wise and personal-life-ish, I noticed some similarities in the things I was looking for by going Home.  (Anytime “home” is capitalized, folks, you can pretty much assume I mean Seattle, not the metal box in Iowa where I live.)

I found that I wanted a few things:  good friends….mountains…a creative atmosphere…a sense of familiarity.  Something.  Things, though, that had very little to do with a specific sense of place, and a whole lot more to do with more abstract concepts.  Sure, I love the Seattle skyline.  I love the weather.  I love the way you can bike anywhere.  A whole lot of the people.  The water, the sky, the trees.

But it’s not specific to Seattle.  Not the stuff I REALLY want.

I’ve tried, in the past months, to apply that to where I am now.  I really did.  I focused more on the people here than anything else, since (just being specific and honest here, no offense to anyone who finds the plains inspiring, which some *do*, I’m sure), the landscape is much less inspiring for me than, oh, say, an empty cardboard box.

It just didn’t *fit*.  I’m allergic to everything.  The weather literally makes me ill.  The politics freak me out.  The people I know *rule*, but OMG THE CORN.  (I’m allergic to corn pollen.  Literally.)  And the pesticides.  Migraines, anyone?

I need me some mountains.  I can deal with temperature fluctuations and pollen if it means I can still stand somewhere and look up and see the earth all around me.  Trees and green instead of corn and yellow.  It’s just better for me.

Enter North Carolina.

It was kind of by accident, really.  I had other business in Greensboro, NC.  (Big stuff, can’t talk about it much yet.  But big and unrelated to any of this brain nonsense.)  I had plans to fly out, stay in a hotel and meet a few people, do some Lime & Violet meet n’ greet-ing with some folks, and fly home.  I fully expected to think it was nice and all, but no Seattle.

Oops.

After four days, I kinda fell in love.  With people, with the drawl, and the relaxed feel, and the neighborhoods, and the trees.  I extended my trip for four more days.  (And found out there are something like six HUNDRED letterboxes, just in the Greensboro area ALONE.  I kid you not.  The mind boggles, considering there are just over 50 in the entire *state* of Nebraska.  Seriously.)

I flew home with some trepidation.  I mean, really — here I was, cheating on my Home with another place with trees and mountains within driving distance — and I didn’t care all that much.  I hadn’t had the time to develop the iron hooks in my brain the way I had with Home, but I was definitely feeling the infidelity.

Less than a week later, while sitting here in -3F temperatures (no, seriously.  The HIGH for the day was NEGATIVE THREE….), missing some people and freezing my ass off, I made a deal with myself:  Finish the Valentine’s Day LE package for Happy Housewife (ironic, that name…), and I’d get in the car and just *go* for a little while.

Three days later, I was here:

Just between the Tennessee/North Carolina border, with both windows down, feeling the mist of the morning curling my hair, speeding along at 70 mph toward my geographical mistress.

Houston, we have a problem.

It’s cheaper than Seattle.  Housing is less than half what it would be at Home.  I have built-in friends whom I already miss.  I could finally scale back my life to a reasonable level, get some external office/lab/studio space and continue L&V remotely.  I have a new job on the horizon, starting soon(ish), which isn’t geography-specific.  I have some big things coming up, but nothing that isn’t movable based on *where* it’s done, just *when*.

I do have some things I *have* to do first.  I need to clean up the rest of my life here, which is much easier than it was a year ago  (I got rid of so much stuff, people…seriously, here.  You have no idea.  *I* still have no idea.  Huge severings and shuffle-offs and big reality checks resulting in way less physical encumberances.), but is still considerable.  I need to get some things in order so that systems can be put in place to make everything easier.  I need to do some seriously strategic planning so I can balance everything, should I go in that direction.

To be a hundred percent transparent, too — I’d be doing this alone.  Take that as you think I mean it, because you’re probably right.  I’d be on my own again at 37 years old, and that’s a little scary.  I’m used to the Crazy that is my life as it is, even a move toward something less painful and difficult would be a big scary change, so I waffle.  A lot.

Not that I’ve ever backed off a challenge before this.  Especiallly when it comes to geographical changes.  I’m less prone to moving to a new state just because it’s Tuesday these days, but a lot of *that* comes from having so much stuff anchoring me to one place at a time.  And two weeks in hotels, living with literally a suitcase and an office-in-a-bag has shown me in a real, concrete way that all the Stuff is just that…*stuff*.  I can get by with not-so-much of it, and still be happy and creative and productive.

How you do anything is how you do everything.
T. Harv Eker

I tend to live like I knit:  I start things, try on projects and lives for a while, get a feel for them and see if it’s something I want to commit to before I dive in with both feet, obsess until it’s done, and love the finished object with all its mistakes and flaws, all the while trying on other things for size, just to cement the fact that I’m in the right place/time/project for me.

I cast on North Carolina in early December.  Memorized its stitch pattern and the feel of the fabric.  Compared it to both reality and the ideal.

And I think it’s a project I want to take on.

I had other plans for this entry.  The Eker quote, above, left me a little freaked out at the way I tend to do small things and how it reflects the way I do big things, but honestly — that’s not where my mind is.  I’m in a state of redesign, refiguring the stitch counts of my life and the yarn I’m using to make this crazy blanket, and really…there’s no point judging the finished object from a swatch.

2009 looks like it’s going to be onehellofayear.

Following hot on the heels of the last post, I just wanted to update y’all who don’t see my elsewhereblogs on this:

Tonight, I got rid of most of what I own, arts-and-crafts-wise.  Yarn.  Books.  Fiber.  Tools.  Art supplies.  Fabric.  Sniffies.  Old habits and old interests.  Stuff that I’ve held onto through at least five moves, in some cases, more than seven.  (Stuff that’s literally travelled from Nebraska to Oregon to California to Washington to Nebraska again and came to rest in Iowa.  It’s insane, really.)

I still have a long way to go before I can say I’ve let go of everything but the necessary or the beautiful.

But I’m one step closer.  One great big giant step the size of the Grand Canyon.

I’m just so *ready* now, where I wasn’t before.

It’s a little scary — one would think I’d have grown up Depression-Era for the kind of stockpiling I was tending toward — but not anxious, really.  Excited.  Relieved.  Able to breathe.

I’m going to be putting some things on Etsy that I found — handmade plush things and journals and handspun yarns and probably a lot of original artwork.  I’ll keep you informed about where those things are, in case you’re interested.

With the ball rolling, though, I’m looking forward to finally making it to the places I want to be.

And *who* I want to be.