Week in the Life: Wednesday

I’m keeping up! I almost can’t believe it. I’m not going to say this too loudly but… I might actually finish this. 🙂

Rinse and repeat.

Got up after the first decent night of sleep in days. Packed lunch, watched news, Jason left for work.

Raisin bran, flipboard, and settled in to work on yesterday’s witl post. Wow I’ve had a bunch of views on my little blog. Almost all from linking up on Ali’s blog. So hi new people 🙂 Thanks so much for taking a look!

I got down on the floor to play and love on Miss Kitty. We’ve been a bit distant for a couple of days after the traumatic cat carrier incident.

When she got bored with me, I got up and started some cleaning. Laundry, vacuuming, and cleaning the bathroom.

It hit me last night that we only have about 7 more weeks until we go pick up Little Man so I need to really get after his room. It has been the holding area for all of our boxes of stuff since we moved in. Jason set up the bed last weekend and shifted some boxes so it looks a little less like a Hoarders episode. But still a LOT to do. Which I have a feeling that a lot of the stuff in boxes is going to goodwill. If we haven’t needed it in the past 2.5 weeks, we might not really need it.

I emptied out a box of stuff that mostly went into the shed. SO happy we have outside storage space now. I hung up some pictures in the kitchen. I don’t remember ever being this excited for decorating before. It’s actually fun unpacking and figuring out where to put things.

Had lunch, IM’ed with my sister and jason, and more Flipboard. Can you tell that’s my current obsession? I check it at least 10 times a day right now.Showered and put away laundry. Checked my challenges on SDD. Worked in my flylady zone for this week, the bedroom. Dusting and putting away things that don’t belong. I think I’ve done more in my zones since we moved than I did all last year. Want to keep things nice 🙂

Jason came home and we headed to the grocery store. We usually go on Sunday or Monday, but with one thing and another we kept putting it off.

We got home and I put some junky food in the oven. (Jamaican patties and pigs in a blanket). We watched a little tv and I moved my laptop over to the couch do I could do the Speed Scrap at SDD. We ate and watched a new Betty White show and some other sitcom that didn’t make much of an impression. I did my speed scrap. It’s always nice scrapping and chatting even when there are just a few of us. Jason had fallen asleep on the couch so I woke him up and we went to bed.

Project notes-
I feel like I’m sort of settling in with this. I’m continuing to use Momento to keep notes. Photo count is down a little, but I was expecting that to happen. I think the doing P365 for the past year and a half has done a lot to help me think of things I want to photograph. I already took a lot of everyday photos, so I knew the biggest challenge would be the documentation part. I’ve found that I’ve gone from writing notes every hour on monday to doing it every 3 or 4 hours yesterday. I might be losing some details, but I think I’m getting a good summary. Most of this post was copied and pasted straight from Momento again. One other somewhat surprising thing is that I’m not really using instagram at all. I usually take a lot of instagram pictures, but I don’t think I’ve taken any this week. Which is okay, but I might do some of those today. (I’m hclappy if anyone wants to follow me)

Day 3 stats:
36 photos taken
4 Momento notes
1 tweet
2 Foursquare check-ins
1 distracted wife
1 on the mend husband
1 playful kitty
4 more days to go

Week in the Life: Monday

So yesterday was interesting. Well not really. I’m just trying to put a positive spin on things. I think the universe is trying to tell me to get over myself and cultivate a more positive attitude. I’m trying, universe, really I am.

Yesterday started at 3 a.m. with Miss Kitty jumping around acting like a nut. This has become way too common. She gets a wild hair, then Jason gets riled up. I can usually sleep through the turmoil until he starts throwing pillows at her… So I laid there for a while, but the Exedrin I’d taken the night before squashed any thoughts I’d had about getting back to sleep. Plus I had Ideas. Ideas about decorating the living room. Ideas about blog posts. Ideas about calling my sister Right Now and asking if she had my sewing machine because it was imperative that I start sewing all my clothes Right Now. This is what happens when I take Exedrin, I get a lot of crazy notions in my head. It’s the caffeine. I spared my sister a middle of the night phone call and started making lists. I heart lists.

Sorry for all the bad photos. I’m putting the unedited versions here.

More drama with the cat ensued when I finally headed back to bed, around 6. We decided that we’re up for the day. Jason headed to the shower and I started making lunch, coffee, etc.

When he comes out, he’s doubled over with chest pains. Of course inside I’m freaking the hell out. But I asked a few questions and figured it wasn’t a heart attack. (Don’t take this as sound medical advice. I know the signs very well and knew it was probably was intracostal strain) But still, very upsetting to see your love in pain like that.

He laid on the couch until time to go to work. I was worried, second guessing myself every two minutes, vacillating between “He’s going to be fine.” and “What if something happens while he’s driving?”. But he was starting to feel better and like he could go, so he went to work.

I did my morning routine stuff, starting laundry, emptying the dishwasher, clean up the kitchen, and stretch. Breakfasted on bran flakes. Watched some Today Show and listened to iPad Today. Lamented that Leo Laporte does some really dumb things for such an intelligent guy. Showered. Really exhausted from lack of sleep. Worked on Ye Olde Blog and IM’ing with Jason. He made it into work relatively ok. Traffic was bad.

I worked on the living room shelves. We got another Billy bookcase from IKEA on Sunday so I have plenty of room to spread out my cookbooks, scrapbooks, and various other things. I unpacked six boxes of books and arranged them somewhat artistically. It was actually nice having the planning time in the early a.m. because I had a good idea of where I wanted things to go so it went pretty quickly.

In progress.

The rest of the morning was taken up with Flipboard, Pinterest, and purging e-mails. Also a snack of seafood salad and ritz. This is where  you queue the foreboding music.

Before I get to that, I’ll talk a little about my process. All throughout the morning I was taking lots of pictures foe WITL with my iPhone. I used the Momento app to make little notes. The app also collects my Facebook and twitter posts. That’s how I was able to keep pretty detailed records of my morning. Since I’m in the process of unpacking still, I took a lot of pictures of that, like the before and after shots of the shelves. Every half hour or so I’d stop what I was doing and snap a couple of pics and make a couple of notes in Momento. I knew the first day would probably be the most detailed, since the first day of any project is always shiny and new and full of promise. I figure it’ll taper off towards the end of the week and I’ll be talking less about my daily routine and more about whatever unpacking/ decorating projects I’m working on. That’s the plan at least.

Anyway back to my day. I had lunch and settled in to do some SDD stuff, catching up on the forums and seeing what else I needed to work on to finish out the month. Then I got sick. Back to the computer feeling a little woozy but ready to push through. Then sick again. And again. Talked to Jason and asked him to bring Gatorade. Figured out it must have been the seafood salad. So not in the mood for WITL documentation at that point. Listened to a couple of How Stuff Works podcasts and felt miserable.

Jason came home feeling pretty rough too so we spent the rest of the night on the couch feeling sorry for ourselves. At some point in the afternoon before I started getting sick I had put some BBQ chicken in the crock pot so we had food. I made some pasta and green beans. We ate and I cleaned up and finished laundry in between getting sick some more. I was Super Cranky at this point and just wanted sleep.

But MK had other plans. She had slept most of the day, taking a brief break to supervise me getting the shelves together. So she decided instead of letting us sleep, she wanted to run around the room making noise and jumping on things. I tried to put her in the carrier, but it was too traumatic for both of us, so I ended up putting her in the guest bathroom for the night. Didn’t sleep well because I kept waking up wondering where the cat was.

Thoughts on Day One. When I woke up this morning I was in a Foul Mood and ready to call off WITL completely. It was too much. I couldn’t handle WITL+being sick+Jason in pain+ unpacking+ lack of sleep. I felt my dreams of having a really cool book on my shelf slip away.

Then I remembered Elise Blaha’s post from yesterday about how she is doing WITL this time around. Less documentation, just lots of photos slipped into her Project Life book. Hmmm… maybe it’s not a lost cause after all. I could probably handle that. Ideally I would still love to have a book like Nettio’s, but in the meantime I’ll keep snapping away. And if my WITL ends up being just photos and blog posts stuck into Project life, then that’s still awesome. Roll with the punches and always have a backup plan right?

So Day One down-
35 photos and screenshots taken
11 Momento notes
1 FB post
7 tweets
1 Cranky sick wife
1 husband in pain
1 cat with a death wish
6 days to go….

What’s your system? (mobile)

I listened to the latest episode of the Paperclipping Roundtable recently where they talked about your scrapping system. That is such a big topic I just had to write about it.

I loved hearing about Amy Tan’s system of scrapping using mini books. She basically keeps a little bag of stuff in her purse that she uses to collect things so that when she gets home, a lot of the work is already done. She keeps a book to jot down notes, a pen, tape, even a tiny printer to print photos on the go. She must have a Huge Purse. I’m really intrigued by that idea, and might work on something like that for the summer.

That got me thinking about my own digi version of scrapping on the go. How can a digital person keep up with things while on a trip, or just collecting everyday things for Project Life?

My best tool is definitely my iPhone 4. I can’t say enough about the ease of use, the great camera, and of course all the apps! I would definitely not get as many pictures as I do if I were using the regular camera.

The thing on the phone that I use the most for scrapping is the Momento app. I’ve seen a lot of people sing it’s praises and I’m definitely joining that choir. You can use it to jot down notes, collect photos, and it even grabs feeds from your social network. I’ve been using it since last spring and it has been so helpful to refer back to, especially if I need to remember details for a layout.

Camera apps. I want to do a whole post on these, but on the rare occasion you take a crappy iPhone picture, they can do a lot to help it look better. The one I use the most is Instagram.

There is a lot more to my system than just my phone, but as far as keeping up with things on the go, nothing has helped like it has.