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.