- A cold snap plus the decision to cancel the duck show at the end of this month gives me the freedom to play, think, write; try something different. Realized I’ve been working two full time jobs without a real break (except for a funeral, which isn’t a break at all) for at least two years–ALL my vacation time from my day job has gone to the birds, and I’ve been charging 27 hours a week to the business, on average.
- Rest. Sleep. Play.
- New Year’s Resolutions:
- 1. Make more art. For now, this includes more playing. I want to paint my tired old vinyl floors something more interesting. (People who have dogs do not need white vinyl flooring.) Recover the couch, and for at least today, I’m thinking of painting the upholstery myself (hey, I talked myself out of knitting slipcovers…). Finish carving the box columns for the front porch and get them installed; work on the back porch. Finish the indoor projects before the weather gets pretty and I don’t want to be indoors at all.
- 2. Get published four times. Recognized that I AM a writer, on top of everything else, and I really need to take action on that. Keeping a blog on a website is nice but it’s a limited readership. So get something written out there and let the universe of the written word decide what happens next. So far, I’m 2.5 toward the goal–sent an article to the UCCG newsletter; sent a story about Ridgway to several newsletters; editing a book about chainsaw carving that I hope to have ready by Ridgway 2004. I wish my co-carvers could spell…
- (An amusing-to-me observation: At my day job, I am partly responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the estimates we make for software projects. Sometimes I think our processes are overkill. I was sitting with my raw files for this book–downloads of a year’s postings on the Carving Post chatlist–wondering how long this project was going to take and was it realistic to expect to have a saleable product by the end of February. Started the spreadsheet–total size of the *.txt files, size of the *.doc files after clean up, page-to-*.txt ratio, minutes/page to clean files… Project forward across the entire set of files. 40 hours. Ouch–that’s just for initial processing; not including reading and real editing at all. Account for initial set-up of the file cleaning macro–lots of learning time. Revise estimate based on new processing time. 22 hours. Better. Might get even faster as I go.
- Currently looking at 600 pages which is too many. Will call around to get copying prices, too–that will affect my red pencil when I start reading. Need to add time for the index; that’s the biggest selling feature, IMHO.
- But: Artist or not, I can’t get away from 14 years of day-job training. Keep that estimate spreadsheet and keep evaluating estimate-to-actual and see where I stand. If I do this in 2004, I’ll start earlier, to be sure.)
- 3. Drop one, add two. One of the coaching newsletters I read offered a suggestion for improving your life: Each month, drop one thing you dislike and add two things you do like. By the end of the year, you’ll be in a completely different situation. This struck me as a powerful suggestion, in part because I had already done this for January, albeit not according to this plan. I had a thought that I needed more time in my day, and one thing that took time was reading the WSJ every day. I feel a need to keep up with the world; I like some of the columnists; I hope one day to be the subject of one of their A-hed stories, and I love the crossword puzzle, but nevertheless the idea of that extra time struck me as desirable. So I put myself on the Friday subscription. To the best of my knowledge, the WSJ doesn’t promote this, but their vacation stop website let me do it. May subscribe to the online version to keep up with the columnists and the editorial page. Drop one.
- Add two: Knitting and movies.
- See the last of the December 2003 blog for one entry about getting Law and Order DVDs as a Christmas gift, and another about knitting again after 4 years away from the needle(s). (It’s just like I never left, which was also true about smoking after some time away… hum.)
- I haven’t written in here about my total TV abstinence program. From 1969-now, I have watched less than 1 hour of TV a week, max, and that’s probably a gross overstatement. I have watched TV when I visit my parents, and in hotel rooms on business trips, and that’s it. Don’t go to many movies, either. I’ve owned a VCR for about 4 years but I bought it to watch videos that accompanied a business class, and own 2x as many exercise tapes (that I don’t use) and chainsaw carving videos (that I do watch), as movies. (22:11, for the record.)
- So now I own two years of Law and Order on DVD and I’m engrossed, but leery of a powerfully addictive medium, but I’m knitting during the shows and that’s a good thing, and observant that the rhythm of my day is shifting and I’m sleeping more, which for me is a also a good thing. And eating less–rush to eat dinner so I can sit and knit and watch the show and knit, instead of lingering over dinner and a book and second or third helpings.
- I had an inkling that perhaps loading my database with other people’s stories and images in the form of movies and TV would be a good thing back in October, when I blew up a TV in a hotel room during a Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode. (People told me whodunit; waiting for the third year to come out on DVD to go back and see if I can determine what was so disturbing about the show that I couldn’t let myself see the ending.) (See Feb 1 entry for more about this episode.) For today:
- Not sure if movies can replace the impact of a TV series which develops characters over a much longer time frame.
- Not sure how I can adjust my routine to accommodate movies, with their longer times, as opposed to the neat 43-minute units of a TV series.
- No-one locally rents sets of TV-series DVDs.
- My budget doesn’t have a whole lot of room for buying sets, and even daily rentals at the Mini-Mart ($3/day, $1.50 on Wed) mean something else goes. For that matter, I’m not sure what the whole point of this exercise is. I’m attached to my role as book-maven, generally knowing which is the best book to read in any of a number of fields, and movie-viewing and book reading displace each other. Allowing that a year of movie viewing probably won’t hurt much. It’s a big void and it never hurts to be a little bit in touch with the culture.
- My day-job manager told me about netflix.com, which rents an unlimited number of DVDs, three at a time, for $20. I can watch 9 movies at the Mini-Mart for $20 a month, but with that program I have to flip the movie in one day or I pay more. Netflix lets you keep the disk as long as you want but doesn’t send any more than three until you return one. Looks promising. Spent 90 minutes on their site, entering reviews of the few movies I’d seen and selecting from their listings (which include a few TV series!). At least until we get to DST and I can carve on weekdays after my day job, it looks like an interesting experiment.
- I woke up this morning wondering what I would drop and add in February, and then had to remind myself it was only the 11th of January and there were three more weeks for the next round of changes to present themselves.
