This winter has really gone too far. So, I need to remind myself (and you) that it will end. I have decided to do that with pictures.
Time to wish away those grey skies and deep covering of white.
It will be warm and sunny again. There will be color!
There will be new life and liquid water.
And construction.
And boats and beaches. It will come. Right now, it seems so very,very far away but it will come.
I don’t know about you but I am a sucker for organization books and time management books. Somehow I think that they will change my life and make it so wonderful that it won’t take any effort from me. Okay, I know that I am not a princess and that nothing will make my life that simple but a girl can dream.
Graphic by Cieleke Graat
I have been feeling particularly discombobulated. There is so much that I want to do and I just have not been able to get on a schedule that seemed to work. I was bouncing from one thing to the other but not feeling very satisfied. I was not writing as much as I wanted to and my time was like a giant black hole.
At the first of the year, I knew that I had to change. I wanted to be more productive. I was ready. I think that being ready is an important ingredient in being able to make changes. Maybe I just was not as ready before. Whatever the problem was, I knew that I needed to overcome it.
I read a review of a time management book that seemed interesting. I went to Amazon, the easiest place to start looking. Right now, I can’t remember the title of that book. But while I was reading about that book, another book caught my eye. The book is Manage Your Day-To-Day.It has the sub-title Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind. This sounded like the title for me. I took a further look into the book.
The book has four chapters and each of these chapters has several essays written by creative professionals. For example, the first chapter is – Building a Rock-Solid Routine and features the following essays:
Laying the Groundwork for an Effective Routine by Mark McGuinness
Harnessing the Power of Frequency by Gretchen Rubin
Q&A Honing your Creative Practice with Seth Grodin
Building Renewal into Your Workday by Tony Schwartz
Making Room for Solitude by Leo Babauta
At the end of each Chapter there is a summary titled Key Takeaways. I really liked that it had a summary of each chapter. I thought it really added to the suggestions.
After looking though all the information about the book and noticing that it was $3.99 as a kindle book, I bought the book. I am very glad that I read this book. It gave me several insights and ideas. It does follow a lot of the suggestions that I have read elsewhere about avoiding checking email and social media sites frequently during the day. I do think that this is one of my problems. The urge to keep up with email is hard to resist.
I have found this book to be really beneficial. I feel like I have been more organized and ready to get more accomplished starting out this year.
Thanks for reading!
Do you ever wonder if when someone wrote or invented something that they meant for it to be used in the way it is currently used?
I started thinking about this when I attended a funeral last week. As part of the funeral, the song “On Eagle’s Wings” was played. Perhaps it is just where I live but “On Eagle’s Wings” has become THE funeral song. So much that if it were played at any other service, I think people would be looking around for the body or spontaneously start crying. The question in my mind was did Father Michael Joncas, when he wrote the song, have any idea that his song would be the quintessential funeral song? My guess would be that he was moved by passages in the Bible and created the song. I suppose that you might be moved to create a song that would bring comfort and that it could become a song used for funerals.
In case you are not familiar with the song, here is a YouTube video of Josh Groban singing the song.
There appear to be many inventions that were created by accident. One of my favorites, the telephone, is an example. Alexander Graham Bell was trying to invent a device that would send more than one telegram at a time. Another favorite, the slinky, came from a naval engineer (Richard Jones) who was trying to make a meter that would monitor power on naval battleships.
Photo by Tara Bowen
If you are wondering about some other inventions that were accidents, you can use this link to an article “15 Life Changing Inventions That Were Created By Mistake.”
One of my favorite invention stories is in the book, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. If I have not raved to you about this book before, then somehow I screwed up. I think this book is fabulous. The illustrations that he uses are very interesting. In one of his examples, Mr. Duhigg tells the story behind Febreze and it’s near failure. In summary, let’s just say that while Febreze was actually a breakthrough in scent removal, to get people to buy it they had to market it with a fresh scent rather than its original scentless form. (The whole story is much more interesting to read.)
So see what letting your mind wander a bit can do? You can think of all sorts of random things.
Thanks for reading!
It came as no huge surprise to me that I started the year reading two books that are not on my reading list.
If you read this blog regularly, you may have seen the post about free or nearly free books. (You can read it here.) Since I wrote that post, I have now signed up for a new service. I receive an email each day with 2 or 3 e-books that are on sale for a cost of somewhere around $1.99. The special price is for that day only. If you are interested, you can sign up at www.bookperk.com .
The first book that I read was a result of receiving a deal from Book Perk. The book, Little Bitty Lies by Mary Kay Andrews, was a $1.99 purchase. I do love a good popcorn book.
POPCORN BOOK – A book that you read for entertainment. The plot moves quickly and has no huge redeeming value but for light reading.
This book was really popcorn but perhaps without the good butter and salt. I guess I like the plot in my light reading to at least seem plausible. This one didn’t but it was still okay. If you were to read it, do it for the silliness and not any moving plot. To be honest, I had not read a book for a few weeks (except for all those children’s Christmas books in December.) and it was a good way to kick start my reading. The author, Mary Kay Andrews is a bestselling author who has written at least eight books. I would try another book by her just to see if I liked it better.
Not really a ringing endorsement, huh?
(Slight rant here. I like taking e-books out of the library. The problem is with timing. I will get the notice that the book is ready for me but I am not ready for it. I have taken out a lot of books and not read them in time which makes me feel guilty.) (I am good at feeling guilty.)
The second book I read was one that I had been considering for a long time. In fact, I had taken it out of the e-book section of the library but I didn’t get to it before it was returned.
I went to the library site last week and thought of the book again and put a hold on it again. I got the message several days later that the book was available for me. I downloaded it and discovered that I had only 7 days to read it. I decided that I would read it as I didn’t want to take it out for a third time in the future. Also, I knew that the author was about to release a follow up book.
So after all of this, what was the book? The name of the book is Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and it was written by Ransom Riggs. I will start by saying that I liked the book. It is categorized as a fantasy book. It is a fantasy but it is more in the vein of Harry Potter than a book of fairies and demons. Yes, there are good guys and bad guys and people with strange powers. The cool thing about the book is that there are photographs scattered throughout the book of the “particular” children. These photographs are photographs that he actually found and used as inspiration. Unfortunately, the photos, when the book is read on an e-reader (or one as old as mine), do not come across as well as they might. I think that looking at them in a book would add to the story.
I liked the story and the premise. I will admit that I was a bit irritated at the end. It just ends so that the next book can start. It is TBC – to be continued. While on television we expect that, I did not expect it as much with a book. The new book, Hollow City, has now been released. I am not ready to jump into it which is surprising as I should want to know what happens.
The story has children with special powers and time loops and suspense. It was a quick read – I made it in the 7 day deadline. (Okay, I made it in 4 days.) I did enjoy the book except for the unfinished end. It may be that you will enjoy it more because you know that the end is not the end. I would not discourage you from reading it.
What are you reading this weekend? Let me know. I obviously stray from my reading list.
Thanks for reading!
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I am always looking for ways to save some money. Unfortunately, I am much better at spending money than saving money. I don’t think that I am alone in this but it is the sad truth.
Last week I saw an article about the 10 Things NOT to Buy in 2014. Of course, the title intrigued me and I had to look at it. While I am going to list the 10 things, if you want the explanation, please use the link above to go to the article and check it out. It is not a long article and will only take a few minutes to read through. The 10 things are as follows:
I thought it was and interesting list and I posted a link to the article on my Facebook page so that others could check it out. Over the weekend, my husband and I were having a discussion about random things and I brought up the article. He had seen it (imagine that, we are friends on Facebook!) and we started talking about some of the things mentioned.
My husband brought up cable TV. I have for years complained about the price of cable and he and my daughter just looked at me. So we were both on the same page about cable TV for the first time but what would we do without it? We had two main concerns. The first was that we do like to watch live sports (football mostly) and how we would be able to do that without cable. The second was that we do use our cable provided DVR for three programs a week. (Yes, you read that right – three programs.)
We did a little research and found that you can buy an indoor antenna and amplifier so that you can get the standard TV channels. The cost of buying these two items is ½ of one month of cable. That should get us standard TV. During football season, we would not have ESPN for Sunday night football. While we do tend to watch that, it was not worth paying for a month a cable to see four football games.
Now we move to living without the DVR. This is where we move into buying other services. We already have streaming Netflix. I am not really sold on streaming Netflix because they never seem to stream what I want to watch but I will admit that I rarely try to use it. I may need to become more familiar with it.
We also already own a Roku. (If you are not familiar with Roku, click here to link to their web site.) While we have owned the Roku for a few years, it provides lot of other possibilities that we have never really explored. We discussed using a service like Hulu Plus. Even if we do and have to pay $7.99 a month for Hulu Plus, it is still a lot less than cable.
We have two TVs in the house that we use. So for the one TV, we can have the antenna and amplifier and the Roku with streaming Netflix. This is all fine because that one TV is an HDTV. The other TV is not HD. In order to use the new cable-less system, the other TV has to be HD also. So, we might have to buy a new TV.
As luck would have it, is the perfect time of year to buy a new TV. So, we could buy a new smart TV and then we would not have to buy another Roku. If we buy a new smart TV, it would eat up our cable savings for, let’s say, six months. If we don’t buy a smart TV, then we would have to buy the TV and Roku. That would mean that we would be spending 4 or 5 months of cable. Still, either way, we would see significant savings from cutting cable this year.
Of course, this works because we don’t really watch that much television. I certainly watch more than my husband but I think that I watch too much anyway. I don’t usually watch anything that is that important. I could use my time in other ways.
Also, we live in a metropolitan area and the television stations are not that far away. We should, with the indoor antenna be able to pick up the signals. Being able to pick up the signals with the indoor antenna is key to the success of this venture to cut the cord.
As a first step, we have ordered the indoor antenna. We will disconnect the cable and see how it works. If it seems like it will work then we will move ahead. The next step will be deciding on the TV and getting another indoor antenna.
Have you tried to go without cable? What have been your experiences? I would love to hear about them. So far, it looks like we would initially spend up to the cost of seven months of cable bills to be able to cut the cord but then our cost would go down to $7.99 (Hulu Plus) per month. It seems like a good idea but is it possible?
What do you think?
Thanks for reading!
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Carol Early Cooney 