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Yesterday was the first time possibly for this whole year, that my soul started to get replenished. A lot happened so I’ll post in parts.

Started the morning with breakfast with Charles. He has scoped out the whole hotel grounds and pretty much knows how to get everywhere. This is great because I am constantly getting lost going back to my room. We headed over to the restaurant and had breakfast. I had the breakfast buffet but really got no more out of it than what I had for my room service order the day before. We hung out and chatted and stuff before wandering off to the reception. Jonathan had said to request his room be located somewhere near mine (I am gonna spend a lot of this con getting lost, I can tell) and also to pick up my message which we discovered was that my package had arrived. The package department it turned out was all the way at the other end of the campus, where we had already been.

After we finally found Packaging,we picked up my fabric order. It looks to me like I should be still getting a second package because this didn’t have the contents of the order that I never received at home, which they said they would also send. Either way, this fabric so far is a bit heavier than I had planned which has me a bit worried about schleppage home as in how many more items (aka books) I have space for.

Charles and I hung out for a bit more – he kindly gave me some specfic books from the Philippines and we chatted about the scene there, and WFC and whether we thought dry ice would stay dry and icy long enough for ice cream to be mailed successfully from Ohio. I suspect that we won’t actually be able to test this as the last chance to order icecream to get it here by the end of the con is today.

Charles walked me back to reception and sat with me til my Mum’s cousin came and picked me up for the day!

 

 

 



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October 20   To Do Lists

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I have to admit I’ve not been sticking to any system for organising or managing my tasks for a while. It was pointed out to me that from my post yesterday, it was clear that I set goals way too high for myself and then leave myself constantly feeling like I come up short. Well, yeah. I do that. And somewhere along the line, I stopped celebrating or rewarding the wins.

Which is true and yet not. I did order myself a very nice lot of fabric which would perhaps amount to several rewards for the last few months and was a few things I’d had my eye on.But it wasn’t a – here this is a reward for getting all this stuff done. I tend to greet the end of tasks by moving onto the next thing.

One thing I have been trying is iDone This. At the end of every day the website emails you and asks you to email it what you did that day. And then it gives you a tick for each day you got stuff done. OK well that bit I find quite hilarious. Because I am entering everything I get done including day job achievements, housework and TPP. It then lists what you entered when you click on each day. You can quickly scan through and see which days were more productive than others, assuming each line item is of equal value.

I’m trying to enter tasks as step by step so say I worked a lot on a book, I don’t write “progressed book”, I write down each step of achievement that led to that. It’s helping me look at things rather than not having achieved the lofty goals but more at what I did actually get done. And if I spent the day at a family commitment, say, then I write that done. Because that’s what I got done and spending time with people who matter should count when you sit down and think, “what the hell did I do with my life?”

But I do need to link that back into more effective list writing and management and also planning. When  I come home from my trip, I’m planning on setting out a year long work plan and to then break that down into various smaller parts. So I will try and enact “big and little reward milestones” as Terri gently pointed out to me today. I should be rewarded for making it partway towards stupidly huge goals. And, I might reward myself just a leetle bit more in the dealers room at WFC. I think that’s probably likely :)

I discovered that the Fat Quarter Shop would happily post my order to the hotel in San Diego instead of to Australia. And whilst I was putting together that order with all the bits and pieces that I’ve had my eye on plus some Christmas fabric as I’ve decided to make some gifts for C’s family this year, I realised I have never received my last order! (The ballet set above.) After I queried, they have been really happy to send me a replacement, in the same postage. Which is really very kind of them. And then tonight, I was hunting round for pics of the fabric I ordered for this post, I found he NYC fabric I had wanted and then couldn’t find later. As I was ogling it, I got an email telling me one of the charm packs I’d ordered was out of stock and not being reordered, would I like to replace it with something else?! Well I got me a yard of this (below)! Though I do quite like others in this design series.

I think I really am itching to get back to sewing. I always panic that if I take too long away from my crafts, I’ll forget all about them. It’s reassuring to know that eventually I come back on my own, because I want to, or need to. I often think about Janet Catherine Berlo who wrote Quilters Lessons: Notes from the Scrap Bag of a Writer and Quilter. She is an academic in art history and suffered a terrible writers block after her mother died. And basically she took up quilting and for a year did nothing but quilted. I don’t have that luxury. But her series of essays are so memorable about how she became entranced with colour play and how some days all she was up for was cutting out material and other days would be a flurry of activity. And how some projects would lie out for months as she’d play around with how they looked before she completed them. All of that is how I’m starting to think I would like to spend my Christmas Holidays.

 



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