Getting ready for a new puppy

Even before we went to England we knew we would get a new dog soon. My sensitive middle son was very attached to our dog who died in March, and is also attached to our neighbor's 15-year old dog. We feel like getting a new puppy is almost a necessity.

Before we went to England we visited a local breeder who I know a little bit who has two litters of black Portuguese Water Dog (PWD) puppies. (Because of my allergies we're looking at purebreds with non-shedding coats.) We were pretty sure we would be bringing one home at the end of October. But when we came home from our trip and the weight of my household and family responsibilities hit my shoulders like a ton of bricks, I began to rethink that decision. For one thing, these puppies are very expensive. And for another, I could see that even though the rest of the family would love the dog, the work would fall to me. A big dog can really only be walked by an adult, and PWDs need intellectual stimulation and exercise and training. I had time to do agility with Jake when he was young; I think I'd just feel guilty I couldn't do the same with this new dog.

I'd thought of a smaller dog earlier in the process, but when I asked my family, particularly dh, they preferred a larger dog. Really, I think, we just wanted a new Jake. And the PWDs we looked at looked just like Jake. But I remembered something an older friend said to me recently "In the end, you're only responsible for your own happiness," and I wasn't sure that getting a bigger dog was taking care of myself.

I asked my family to write me a letter telling me how they would help me out both with the dog and with other work I do when we got a puppy. They didn't write anything. So I started to think about a compromise that both gets my middle boy a puppy and doesn't make me much crazier than I already am. I came up with a smaller dog that costs less, makes smaller poops, and doesn't need it's own seat to travel in a car (we bought a mini-van to in part to travel with Jake). We're getting a Bichon Frise that the boys will be able to walk, even when it's full grown. The boys are fully converted after seeing some pictures. They sound fabulous although some say they're hard to house train -- I hope they're wrong!

I felt sad today when I told the PWD breeder we had decided on another breed, but maybe that's just the end of saying goodbye to Jake. We're working on names for our new puffball (who I plan to keep in a puppy cut)! My hope is that a smaller dog will need less training (maybe I'm wrong there!) and will be easier to exercise. I know the crate will fit into our house better!

Facing a layoff

Yesterday at noon, my husband was sure he'd be laid off today. By two he had heard through the grapevine that he had received a reprieve in a behind-closed-doors shouting match. We are not feeling very secure in our income right now.

I'm using the following precepts, very loosely borrowed from yoga, to deal with the situation.

1. Open to grace. I believe we need to continue to notice and enjoy our blessings, and also open to any gifts that may come to us. This may involve sharing our worries to some extent with our circle, who cannot help if they don't know about any problem. In church we pray for those who are in grief or distress, facing medical treatment, etc., and I realize that we are none of those.

2. Ground yourself to the earth. For me this is currently taking the form of determining what our values and priorities are. I have become aware today that my job may be to maintain normalcy as my husband is stressed out. I am too, but I think I need to bury it for the kids. We need to decide what is important, and it is emerging to me that what is important is to live as happily as possible, especially for the kids.

It also means to me being very concrete in our defining options and making decisions. For instance, our initial response to this uncertainty is to stockpile money, which makes me feel rather hopeless because it is so amorphous. I'm hoping to come up with something more concrete -- decide how much money we want to save this month and create a budget, which gives us a more positive goal to work toward, rather than looking at any spending at all as a failure, and allows some fun or necessary expenditures.

3. Open, reach, stretch. So I'm not so sure what this means to me today. Perhaps I'm still working on 1 and 2.

Reviewing Online Personal Finance Tools

For a few months now I've been messing around with some of the online finance apps, mainly Yodlee, Mint, and, as of today Quicken Online, which is now free. I've also looked at Wesabe and Geezeo.

I've gotten fed up with the Quicken desktop application. They've forced me to upgrade to an inferior version which then corrupted my data, forcing me to do far more work than I'm willing to do to fix the data file. I'm a long-time user of Quicken, but it provides more features than I use, and I didn't always trust the results it gave me.

My main financial goal is to live within our means. I want to be able to enter recurring and other upcoming bills and find out what's left to spend. I want to be able to use this information as a decision-making tool when I have the gimmes for a new outfit, a GPS, or a trip to Aruba -- can we afford it this month? This is the tool that I've had tremendous difficulty finding, but today I discovered that Quicken Online does an adequate job. It doesn't seem to use the current credit card balance(s) to calculate it's Real Balance (R), but at least it's on the right track, showing me, on the first page What's Left. True, it's completely wrong, but if I look at the Checking account, it shows me upcoming bills and income and the balance at each date so if I input the amount of the upcoming credit card bill(s) I do see the checking account balance that includes all the bills that have to be paid.

Rudder seems to have an app that does what I'm looking for, that is, calculate What's Left based on balances and recurring bills input by the user. But I haven't tried it. It doesn't do much else (not even show you transactions, much less categorize them), and I've scattered our financial information over the web widely enough already. Still it does look like it has the one feature I think every other application is missing. Hopefully one of the other services will snap it up and include its features in their application.

No other online tool that I've found even attempts to show me if we're living within our means this month. Some of them (Yodlee, for instance) are happy to show me how my income and spending compare in past months, but to my knowledge I cannot enter recurring bills and paychecks to calculate something similar to Quicken's What's Left number. Mint doesn't even do a good job at comparing income and spending, showing me a chart where spending appears below the axis, and income appears above, making it visually difficult to compare the two numbers. Geezeo and Wesabe don't seem to have even a chart of spending vs. income over the past few months.

Quicken Online has a long way to go. For instance, it does a terrible job of importing transactions from my bank (same as the desktop version). There is absolutely no identifying information -- I have to open my bank's site and manually enter information for each transaction into Quicken Online. Yodlee manages much better, so clearly the information is available and Quicken is just not using it. Also, Quicken seems terribly slow.

Yodlee has some strengths compared to Quicken Online, which is the current but beatable frontrunner for me. It has a lot of good tools, charts, etc. and categorizes my data well. It also stores our investment information and gives some stats about it. Quicken Online does not appear to handle investments. At least that's what I've read, and so far I haven't been able to link to our modest Sharebuilder account.

I've played a little with the budgeting tools in Yodlee and Mint, and find them inadequate. For instance, Yodlee doesn't add up the various budget categories to give you a total. So if I want to know if I'm budgeting more than our actual income, I have to use a calculator! And I find Mint barely worth discussing. It's pretty, and it tells me what's in each account and gives me a list of transactions, but as for doing any analysis, fergetabowit. I don't understand the buzz about Mint at all -- it's not useful to me.

I looked at Mvelopes a while back, but hated the cost, and found it too labor intensive. I don't feel the need to allocate each dollar of income to a category of spending, although I can see how that would be useful. My needs are of a lower level.

So in the end I'm still looking for the right tool. And I'm willing to pay -- say what I'd pay for a new Quicken over three years. I think that works out to about a dollar a month.

Get a better deal with Charter

We recently got a letter notifying us that our Charter TV rates were going up. The amount we pay for TV strikes me as ridiculous and I decided to see what we could do about it. I started with the online chat, and spent 40 minutes (time I don't have to spare, btw) trying to discover what channels I get for each plan at what cost. Really, pretty simple, right? I'm shopping -- what does this cost, what does that cost, is that a better deal, does this give me what I want.

Well good luck, 'cause Charter doesn't deal in information. And they won't tell you anything without knowing your account number. Well, I wouldn't give it to them. I said I was happy to tell them what market I was in, and eventually gave them an address where there is not actually a house. They quoted me a rate $25 less than what our new rate will be. Finally, I coughed up our account number and asked why we were being charged so much more. Oh, you are getting different channels, was the answer. Well, which different channels, I wanted to know. They wouldn't tell me, but instead transferred me to a different rep who also wouldn't give me the information I wanted. And I had to leave, but honestly, there wasn't a straight answer in sight. I could even show you the transcript, because I saved it.

When I got home, I looked into Dish TV. It's confusing too, but far more upfront about the channels provided at each level. I'd like to be able to put in the channels I want and be quoted a price. Even if they tease me with channels that I could get at the next higher lever, that would be okay.

Later, I called customer service to try to get the skinny. She says they have three tiers, the lower two separated by about $40. I tried to get info from her without coughing up my account number, but finally succumbed. She gave me a price, and I said it was too much, that I was looking into satellite. She said there was a promotion she could give me, adding HBO and Cinemax, adding more HD channels and lowering our monthly price by about $8 (from our current price, not the higher one). Really? More product for less price? Sure, for twelve months. Sounds good, I said. Sign me up. So we're still with Charter. But really, what's with that? Isn't it illegal to price discriminate?

The moral -- push them, ask for more for less $. I wish I'd done it earlier. I wonder if i could have done even better. I have to remember it to do it again this time next year.

Floor finishes

Our new pine floor is in, and I'm in the process of finishing it. I went with a penetrating oil finish rather than a polyurethane. Initially I looked at Osmo Hardwax and Bioshield as more ecological options, but in the end I wanted to use a finish without any petroleum distillates or metal dryers.
It turns out that oil finishes are widely used in Europe, and most of the options come from there. There is more information here:

http://woodcareusa.com/index.html

http://woodyoulike.blogspot.com/2005/11/wooden-flooring-finished-with-lacquer.html

There are actually many options of penetrating oil wood finishes. This is a list of the ones I've found:

Osmo Polyx Oil
Bioshield oil and wax products
Land Ark
Velvit (nice collection of stain colors)
Sutherland Welles
Tried and True Wood Finish
Waterlox
Tung oil
Livos
Weather Bos
AFM Naturals Oils
WOCA (previously Trip Trap)

None of these were easily available locally. Some were available 45 minutes or more away. I thought I would be ordering whatever I chose. The exception is Waterlox, which does tend to be more available, and it was my fallback.

My choice was driven by my desire to go domestic, and to avoid petroleum distillates. Although I worried about the length of time some finishes took to dry, as I researched I discovered that many of the other finishes also take a while (a week or more) to dry, and I imagine that quicker drying is due to drying chemicals. I also had a strong preference not to sand between coats. In the end I went with Land Ark. I make no claim to have tested or thought of everything – I haven't. But time was running short and I liked Land Ark.

I put on four coats over five days, and have just finished buffing the floor. In fact, I feel a little like this laptop is moving back and forth in an uncontrollable way just like the buffer! I think I'm done. If I paint the walls, the room will be unused for another week at least, allowing the oil to dry and floor to cure further. It is not perfect now, and as time passes, it will be less so. But my hope is that it develops a patina, rather than becoming shabby looking!

Here's a picture of my floor (before the final coat and buffing):

[Some safer poly-type products I came across: AFM Safecoat, Vermont Natural Coatings.]

It's now very clear that the walls need to be painted, which wasn't on the short-term to-do list. However, I think I'll go for it anyway. I'm going to try to pick up some Mythic paint on Friday on the way to Fenway Park. There are no dealers near me, but there are dealers in the Boston area. Mythic is non-toxic, which is a big step up from simply low- or even no-VOC, and it gets good reviews from people who have used it. I'll be looking to match the BM Honeywheat color that I used in our family room.

Heating Options for the Winter

For a few years now I've had in the back of my mind the thought that we needed to know how we would heat our house when oil became problematic. The time is here, and we're not ready. Our neighbor is converting from oil to natural gas. I'm not convinced that is right for us. For one thing, if we're spending a lot of money, I'd rather spend it on a system that taps into renewable energy sources, not simply a different non-renewable fossil fuel. For another, my understanding is that in the long run, gas and oil prices track each other.

The alternative heating market is not ready for all us New Englanders who heat with oil and are looking to switch now. I have friends using wood either in wood or pellet stoves. Although wood is renewable to some extent, it's not clean. We have a neighbor who uses wood, and although I enjoy the smell of the wood smoke, I think if my other six close neighbors were using wood, the neighborhood would be unpleasantly full of smoke. And what are those pellets really made of, anyway? And I suspect wood prices will rise as more people switch to it. We have a fireplace with heating rods and a blower, and we may use that more this winter, but wood is a lot of work – it has to be cut, split, stacked, carried, and swept up after. And the fire has to be tended. However, we have some uncut logs out back, and it might be time to put in that work and burn some wood this winter. I'm not sure I can use a chain saw and a splitter with my kids asking me questions and trying to help, though!

We are thinking about building one or more of these solar window heaters (there are other versions around the web). Our south facing windows are on the back side of the house, and we have six double-hung windows back there. There are some trees, but in the winter there are no leaves, and I think the sunlight is still significant. We may build one and see if we think it works. We like this option because it's cheap and we can try it out without cutting holes in our house. They may require some babysitting when the sun is not shining (closing the vents), but it seems that it would be minimal, and nearly free heat would be worth it. The fireplace is in a different room, allowing us to heat two rooms without oil (and very possibly more if we can move the heat around) and paying more attention to heating only where we need it would allow us to save some oil. I'm also looking for more blankets for the beds. For now, we'll stick with our one year old oil hot water heater.

Solar heating seems to be the exception. Solar systems generally seem to be for electricity or hot water. Right now my primary interest is in heat. Our electricity bill is not overwhelming, and neither is our summer oil bill for hot water – our heating oil bills could be. We buy about six tanks of oil a year, and last year I had one bill of about $800.

I'm still looking for a long term solution. Perhaps a heat pump or geothermal system? I have a pipe dream of a few neighbors sharing a geothermal system, but the septic systems might get in the way. I don't generally look to the government for advice, but I wish someone would suggest the right way to jump.

New Living Room Floor

I've tossed around the choices for a new living room floor for about a year – carpet, tile, laminate, or wood. I'm looking for an option that is affordable and environmentally friendly. I'm fed up with carpet, and with the dog turning ten, older dog or future puppy accidents are all too likely. We love the tile in our family room – we never fuss at the boys about what they are doing on it -- but we can't quite picture it in our more traditional living room. Also, the floor isn't quite flat. Laminate just doesn't suit my style – I really prefer less processing. I'm not completely comfortable with the engineering of bamboo, and the fact that it doesn't have the ability to be refinished (or at least not multiple times). We don't really like the look of cork for our living room. So we're left with wood, and the concern that wood and boys may not go together.

We do not have a formal living room. In fact, the boys may spend more time playing in the living room than in the family room. The stairs , the office, the front door, and the downstairs bathroom all abut the living room. Our TV is in the living room. Keeping the boys out is not an option.

I'm not crazy about the look of oak (just a personal preference). I've been looking at pine and hickory. I love the look of pine, and my hope is that we could manage to distress it in an attractive way. Hickory is much harder, but also more expensive. It's attractive, but I prefer the look of pine. I worry that hickory would get damaged, but not in an all-over way as is more likely with the pine.

I'm looking at penetrating oil finishes rather than poly. I like that I could refinish any parts of the floor that needed it. My top picks are Osmo, Bioshield, Velvit, Waterlox, or Tung oil.

I'm leaning toward the pine. I prefer the look, and I can get very affordable pine from a mill about an hour away – it's local, the logging has to meet any environmental standards here. Also, our boiler recently needed a new motor, using some of the money earmarked for the floor. I will finish it myself, probably with Osmo or Bioshield. I'd like to lightly stain it, so that it coordinates with our trim. We'll see if we have the nerve to purposely distress it when put it in – we probably should! Our tax rebate is going to be funding this project!

Recurring Chores

I'm not generally a New Year's Resolution type, but this year I seem to have some, and they're all the stereotypical ones, one being to keep my house better. I've been trying FlyLady again, without complete success. If I get on track with zones, I seem to fall down on weekly tasks. One step I took that I think was helpful was to split my own house into zones that work for my house: 1: Family room and Mudroom (which are connected), 2: Kitchen (which must take 80% of my cleaning time), 3: Bathrooms, Laundry room & sewing room, 4: Bedroom and Office, and 5: Living Room. I also printed out one of these calendars and marked out six day periods and labeled the weeks with zones. That way the family and living rooms don't get shortchanged.

Then I rediscovered Motivated Moms. I must have looked at it before, because I have the free 2002 calendar on my hard drive. Like any system, it doesn't fit me perfectly, but isn't that weekly checklist awful cute? So then I spent obsessive hours trying to figure out how I can make my own Motivated Moms calendar, with my own tasks and intervals that are right for me and my house. I want to be able to easily move a task if too many tasks end up on the same day, and I want to print it out. I looked at Outlook and Microsoft Project and a bunch of pages Google turned up, and didn't find anything that does what I want it to.

But it turns out that Palm Desktop will. I have a monochrome Sony Clie with DateBk5 and it handles recurring tasks pretty well. But I don't always look at it, and the tasks start to build up after a while and become daunting! But Palm Desktop will print out a weeks worth of my calendar. The only fault as far as I'm concerned is that it displays each task with a diamond rather than a check box. I'm surprised it's so difficult to figure this out. I wonder how Motivated Moms makes theirs?

And how does my house look? Well, I just moved the office into the living room so that the new carpet can get put in on Thursday, and it's a wreck!

Choosing Floor Covering

All of a sudden, my whole house seems to be falling apart! I took apart the room we use as a home office last spring and moved the computer into the livingroom. It fits there so well that we lost the impetus to redo the office. Also, in the middle of painting the ceiling I gashed my arm open -- that slowed me down too. But, the office is finally painted (Benjamin Moore Moroccan Red with a white ceiling and medium brown stained woodwork), and for the last few months I've been waffling about what to put on the floor. I'm concerned about allergies, the environment in general, and the environment inside our house. There's another floor that I want to replace, too, money permitting. The living room floor is eight years old and between the kids and the dogs is totally trashed. Our livingroom is at the center of our house -- it leads to a bathroom, the stairs, the kitchen, the office, and the front door opens into it. The TV is in the living room. Shutting it off to kids is not a good option, so the floor needs to survive the boys.

In the end I choose an affordable Berber for the office and then spent at least a month second-guessing myself. I looked heavily at Flor carpet squares. I wanted to like them, but I didn't love any of the options I looked at. So the Berber is being installed tomorrow. I don't feel great about it, but I do think I'll like it, as long as it isn't stinky.

And stinky brings me to the livingroom. The carpet is about eight years old and has been misused by the dog. It isn't bad in the cold weather, but once it starts to get warm and humid, the odor is noticable. I'm really struggling with this one. Affordable, environmentally sound choices don't seem to be prevalent. I'm looking at wood, currently.

Eating Right: Local and Organic

I've recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and I'm thinking more about the way we buy and eat. It's not easy to do the right thing! Here are some of the things I'm thinking about.

I would like to stop buying factory farmed meat. Although I've toyed with vegetarianism, Kingsolver makes a good argument for omnivorism, and then, as always with this issue, there are the practical concerns -- such as my husband really likes meat! So I need to find local meat, and I can. There is a farm about 20 minutes away that sells their own pork, chicken, lamb, and beef. These animals are locally and humanely raised, but I don't know if they're fed pesticide-treated grain. There is a turkey farm another 10 minutes away that has pretty good practices, but could probably not be considered organic. So if I can do the trip just once a month or so, I can probably meet that goal. I am concerned about the cost, but so far the prices are somewhat reasonable, and if I save extra trips to the supermarket, I will probably save some money.


Produce is more difficult for me. I shop irregularly, and try to shop without the kids, so working Farmer's markets into my schedule is more difficult than it should be. There is a farm (not far from the meat farm) that sells in season produce, and they use IPM, so I feel comfortable buying from them. I am not an expert at planning my menus around what I found. I like to choose a recipe then get the ingredients. Also, my husband calls our crisper drawer in the fridge the "rotter drawer" which is sadly too accurate! Frozen organic produce may be my best choice. I'm just not seeing myself buying up all the in-season organic local produce I can find and canning it or otherwise processing it for use the rest of the year. I've considered joining a CSA, but have so far resisted, because I'm afraid that only I would eat what we got, and I'd feel guilty about any waste. As I've said before, I may have gone wrong way back in terms of what my kids will eat!

After reading Kingsolver's book, and with my newly raised conscienceness about pesticides, I find trips to the supermarket excruciatingly frustrating. What's safe? Everything has pesticides or high fructose corn syrup! Of course you know this, but there are whole aisles of junk -- an aisle of cookies and crackers, an aisle of sugar cereal, an aisle of corn syrup salad dressing, and aisle of crunchy pesticide chips. There is no organic bread in my supermarket. I realized that of the healthiest foods I buy, I eat most of them, and my kids get the SAD (Standard American Diet) stuff. (Medium SAD only -- I have some standards!)

I'm getting ready to make our bread. I have a Bosch Universal on my Christmas list, and I think I'll get the Family Grain Mill package from Survival Unlimited with the Bosch adaptor and the hand base. They have the best price I've found. I don't have much of a plan for food stores in case of an emergency, so I figure some wheat berries (which last for years) and a hand mill would be part of that plan. The trade off between time and healthiness is very clear to me. I think I'm willing to take on bread, especially if I'm making 6 loaves at a time. There is the worry that my family won't like what I make, but I've been making bread off and on for a while, and it generally gets eaten. I might not be able to go to 100% whole wheat, but I think it will be healthy bread, and I can buy organic wheat berries. There is a store about 50 minutes away that carries organic whole grains -- worth it if I go only once or twice a year.

Using a PDA to organize homemaking

This is very domestic, but it's what I've been working on lately. I actually wrote this in 2003.


So far I've found one product that meets some of my needs -- that's HandyShopper, which works great for shopping lists and other lists. So far I've used it for a packing list, a running wish list (with categories like bedroom, kitchen, and people's names) and a list of books to buy or borrow. For those applications the ability to store prices is useful. In my opinion hs is good for lists that you want to categorize, and keep prices for. And it's fabulous for shopping lists. I imagine that other shopping list apps are comparable.

I haven't yet found a way that I'm happy with to keep track of housework. I'd like an application that reminded me of daily, weekly,monthly, one-time, and occasional tasks, and allows me to choose whether to record the date the task was completed. For instance I don't need to know when I did morning dishes, but I might want to know I flipped the mattress (and which way it was flipped, too). I'm experimenting with Redo, and somewhere I saw a reference to an application that puts completed todo items into datebook, but I can't remember what it was. It's entirely possible that Datebk5 has this and I'm missing it.

Another thing I'd like to do is menu planning. I'm a little rough on my planning, but it works for me. I plan meals without firm days, so at the very least I'd like an application where it's easy to change the date for a meal. I'd really like to be able to store lists of dishes and apply them to days. Ideally, I would also keep easily updateable lists of meals in the freezer --and as long as we're at it, why not a total freezer inventory.

Another thing I'd like to be able to do is review our finances on my PDA. At $40 Pocket Quicken is a bit steep, but the ability to sync with Quicken is undeniably a plus. I'm still poking around to see what's out there.


A little later . . .
I came up with a solution I think will work for me for housework. I'm using a combination of Diddlebug, Redo with the Todo list, and Datebk5. For chores for which I want to record completion dates in the calendar, I use db5 floating and repeating events. I like that I have the choice of scheduling a chore for the same day every week, or a certain amount of time after I actually complete it and mark it as complete. I use Redo with the Todo list to add chores to the Todo list that I like to be reminded of and be able to check them off when they're done,but that don't need to be stored in the calendar. Redo adds items to the list on the day that they're due. I use Diddlebug for popup reminders that I neither check off nor store in the calendar. My What's for Dinner reminder is a repeating reminder in Diddlebug. I also like Diddlebug as a timer for chores or whatever.
I'm still looking for a menu planning solution. A db5 solution would be fine. I know that some people don't like to clutter up their calendar, but I think it works better for me to have everything in one place. If I figure out filters and whatever other features, I can probably have views that focus what's listed. I wish I could find a version of the db5 manual that I could put on my PDA.

More than time slots I need categories for each day --say for chores, meals, and appointments. With my kids being 1 and 3 we rarely have more than 1 or 2 appointments in a day.

The other big feature that I could use is the ability to store lists and add them to the calendar at will. I could store chore lists, clients who may need work done, and menus in this way. I'm going to look into using the db5 and address integration this way, but it seems a shame to clutter up my address book with other types of entries. I may end up using handyshopper for menu planning. It is a good app to hold lists of things that may or may not be needed right now. Too bad it doesn't integrate with db.

Planning, To Dos, etc.

I'm messing around this week with way to keep on task. I've been using my PDA for a couple of years, but I'm off and on with it -- as I might be with any solution, to tell the truth. I'm on my third Sony Clie SJ20 -- an affordable solution at about $50 used/reconditioned/whatever. I have one with a cracked screen, one that won't charge, and one with a worn out digitizer. So I moved a good battery into the one that wouldn't charge, and I'm using that for the time being. I'm also eyeing these.

I've been using DateBk5 as my planner. I use it more for to dos than for scheduling. But I don't love the way it handles repeating tasks. Somehow, they are set to repeat, but when I check the repeat status of a repeating item, it says None. I don't get that. Maybe only the initial item stores the repeat info. I'm evaluating Life Balance right now, but I'm coming to the conclusion that it isn't close enough to what I want -- especially for the price. I'm not sure that the contexts idea works for me -- I don't really have different contexts. I mostly do my kids and the house, and I fit in my hobbies when I can find an opportunity. And my work is usually one thing at a time, not projects with many steps plus phone calls on the side. And I'm not crazy about the mixed up to do list -- too fiddly to get it in an order that actually makes sense to me. But I do really like the outline approach -- I like it a lot, and I wish I could have my To Do list at the top of Datebk5 in outline form that I could expand and collapse. I would probably use top categories of Errands, Chores, Projects, Money, Hobbies, and Homeschooling. I would like to be able to list chores in outline mode -- sometimes I do just fine with housework -- other times I need a reminder (what do I do each morning? each week?). A collapsible outline would be great. So I may look at outline software for my pda like Bonsai and Arranger. Note Studio has some GTD (Getting Things Done) fans, but I don't get it at all. And it's tempting to spend time messing and evaluating rather than actually doing the things on my To Do list!

I have the following categories of things I like to remind myself to do: chores (repeating), calendar items (some repeating, some not), projects, ongoing goals/projects, and homeschooling topics. What works well for all but chores is a sheet of paper in landscape mode. The top has the days of the week listed, with a column for each day split into three parts (morning, afternoon, and evening). Into that I put appointments. At the bottom of the page I have three columns for things I'm working on for the week: Projects (like chapters I need to revise, items I want to sew, errands I need to run), ongoing goals that require some thought (potty training, evaluating financial newsletters/memberships, gathering things to sell at a yard sale), and topics that seem to be of interest to my kids (or that I want to introduce to them). I very much like planning for a week, and the result is a manageable piece of paper with goals that seem doable. And I've noticed that I get a lot of what I put on that paper done within the week. I'm not sure that the approach makes a difference, though, or if I would have done everything anyway.


I struggle with how much of a record of what I've done I need to keep. I have a strong urge to keep a trail, but I know from experience that I rarely look at that. And I very seldom need it -- not for chores, that's for sure. Occasionally it's interesting as a way to remember where I was and the kind of things I was doing. So for now, I have a small datebook that I keep notes in -- kind of a keyword journal, since it's not big enough for full sentences. I particularly use it for homeschooling topics, activities we've done, etc., even though I don't need to report until next year. I think the urge to journal my life is about a need to feel that I'm really here doing something useful -- I'm not sure that journaling actually helps me achieve that goal. Hubris.