You're Doing It Wrong

Remember in December I bought this big giant bag of flour? Bob shook his head like I was crazy.

Today, the bag is finished.

Remember when I said that I take all my withered potatoes and bury them in the garden? Check it out. This isn’t even all of them yet.

How many times have you thought: I have a few minutes, I’m going to jump online to pay this bill, or print out this airline ticket and then next thing you know you are in some version of update hell waiting for things to download and then unpack and then load and then restart and before that can happen it wants you to update some other thing?

Yesterday I thought I’d do a streaming exercise class but I couldn’t get it to work. I tried every browser on my machine and then I figured it must be from when I updated my operating system. I spent the next 45 minutes making sure everything was up to date, uninstalling and reinstalling, dumping plug-ins, adding widgets, restarting my computer and on and on. I tried to stream via Netflix and got an error message so I did what that said. I looked in support forums. I finally went back to the class site and tried a different class: which worked fine. They’ve recently changed their interface so for whatever reason the class I wanted to take wouldn’t work. That was a stupid way to spend the morning.

The situation with my photos has become dire. I’ve always been lazy about the way I organize them but at least put them into folders with the date and event. I’ve got about a month’s worth that are just blobbed together with confusing duplicates and millions of pictures of pumpkins and dahlias. Every time I try to get a grip on it, I want to cry. So still no vacation photos or Reno photos.

Back in December, I think, I decided to upgrade the operating system on my desktop computer. I bought a 171 page book to help me with this process and I have been working on it ever since.

Every step involved something that took anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 days. It was like: you need to go to this tiny village outside Lisbon to get something but if you can’t do that you can follow this guy on Twitter and the last Thursday of every month, he’ll give you the secret password that you can enter into a special website that you can only access during 2am and 3am in your time zone, once you get it you have to hop on one foot in front of your computer for 207 seconds while wearing a red hat and press shift-control-þ.

Now you’re done with step one.

If you don’t have a þ key, you need to go to Beijing …

I’m barely exaggerating here. Plus I could only work on it when I was stone sober and had all my brain cells operating on maximum which means I never worked on it after work or after a morning of writing.

I upgraded my ram. I learned out to do a proper back-up. I bought an external HD, utilities and widgets. I upgraded and uninstalled. I opened accounts and created passwords.

I finally finished this morning. I skipped a couple of post-installation steps (for now) because I could not bear to create one more username and super secure password. But I authorized and gave permission and near as I can tell: every account and device I ever have had in the history of history is now linked to every other account and device I have ever had. I’m still not sure what that means. There’s probably a guy in a basement somewhere draining my retirement account right this minute.

I’m still trying to learn how to keep a calendar on a computer. I am very fond of writing things down.

I received an alert about the Reserves game tomorrow on my desktop at the same time that my phone was ding-a-linging in the other room. Yay?

I killed all my old Adobe apps and downloaded the cloud thing. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to do these pictures in the latest iteration of Photoshop. I am working hard to bring all three of you loyal readers, the content to which you are accustomed.

Tomorrow is going to be a computer free day. I’ve got two soccer games in the next 24 hours. I’m going to do an hour of power in the yard. Everything is coming together. Finally.

These are all my notebooks from the beginning of time. It took me awhile to round them all up. They’re stuck in cupboards and bookshelves all over my room. I already found one I missed.

The very earliest stuff is from 1978. There are several in progress now. Most are from the 90’s when I was really in to Natalie Goldberg and freewriting my face off.

They’re not all full and some are new and have never been written in. But most of them are well used.

I haven’t been rigidly consistent but usually when I start a new one I write a few lines on the inside cover about where I’m at like where I live and work and relationship status. Since those things have been consistent for so long, now I tend to write what I’m working on. If it’s a fancy notebook I write where I got it. I put the date I started and the date it’s finished on the cover.

I number the pages and use the inside cover as a sort-of table of contents so I can scan to see what’s in the notebook. For example, “Germany trip, pp 17-27” “Spaceship story, pp 33.”

A lot of it should be burned. The oldest stuff, when it was more about journaling, is truly horrifying. Whew: Drama. Queen.

A few months ago I was looking for something and I paged through a half-dozen of them from about 7 years ago. There is some cool stuff in those. The last thing I need right now are new projects but there were so many ideas and clippings, it made me want to stack them next to the bed and treasure hunt.

I wish I was better about keeping them up now. Now so much is digital, I don’t use them much for collecting random thoughts.

I don’t know why I took this with the shadows on the cover. This notebook is covered with stickers of the German national team for the 2002 World Cup.

I used to do a thing where I’d do a computer free day on the weekends. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

During one of my insomnia nights I had this great idea that I would do a computer free August. But I have to use the computer for work so then I thought I would only use the computer at work. But I actually do need to use a computer for personal things like banking and I don’t want to do that at work. Also my phone is basically a computer so I’m not sure what the plan is. Maybe I’ll just do a computer free day each weekend.

This weekend was Cruisin’ the Gut in Vancouver. Bob checked it out last year and said it was insane so this year we both walked down there.

I had a bunch of stuff to do so I told him I didn’t want to stay long and he said: Don’t worry. It’s like a dorm party. You get a headache after an hour.

That turned out to only be partly true. It’s tons of people lined up and down the street with their camp chairs and coolers. And shiny muscle cars cruisin’ up and down Main. And lots more parked in local lots and on the street. It was super fun in a loud and exhaust-full way.

We have new neighbors and so far, they are terrific.

This morning I woke up at 4am to the quiet sound of music. It’s summer. The windows are open. You can’t get mad about people watching TV in their own home with the windows open. Although I was a little irked that they had to watch TV at 4am.

Once I heard it, I couldn’t stop hearing it so I finally got up to close the window. Except the sound wasn’t coming from their house.

I went around to the other side of the bed to see if Bob had left his headphones on but it wasn’t that.

Then I leaned down to the vent and it was the TV in our basement. I stomped downstairs and turned it off. Then I was wide awake.

I crawled out of bed at 5am thinking: oh well, I’m awake. I can get so many things done since I’m up so early.

I normally get up at 5:20. I’m not sure why I thought those extra 20 minutes were going to be so magical. They were not. I used the whole time trying to figure out how to embed those Instagram photos here.