I'm loving this blog thing, as well as my SmugMug account that is finally getting updated and utilitzed. With Becket sleeping only about 9 hours total in a 24 hour period, little has been accomplished around here. Now that I've been creating this blog - which includes looking at all the other blogs I enjoy and peeking at their source codes to see how this HTML thing works - my brain is saying 'Hey, thanks for remembering that I'm here for use!' I think that's why I love knitting so much. You plan and follow charts and steps and carefully count and measure. I am slowly adding the tings I knit while I was waiting for Becket to arrive on the side there. I will try to pull together the photos of things I've made over the past couple of years as well.
In the last week I have created another tool for myself that certainly qualifies as geeky. I use Outlook for all my email, but have started making use of the calendar feature over the last month. And now it is helping with dinner! For several years I have done menu plans - I map out our dinners for a week or month+ at a time. If you don't do it, you should give it a try. Nothing is worse than sitting there in the late afternoon, staring at the fridge, and wondering what in the world you're going to have for dinner. With the menu you shop for those meal items each week and theoretically have everything ready to go - you just look over and say - It's grilled chicken night. The trouble comes when that chicken you were going to grill is still in the freezer. Or perhaps I was going to have something in the crock pot - since I can't warp the time-space continuum yet, 8 hours in the crock pot would make dinner ready at about midnight. So, this is where the Outlook calendar comes in handy. I actually added dinner to the schedule for each night instead of having it on a seperate piece of paper. Then, Outlook lets you color code your appointments. So I assigned dinners that have parts in the freezer as an icy blue, and dinners that use the crock pot as orange. Then I can quickly see if I should get out the crock pot that morning. I also put a 2 day reminder on the freezer stuff so a message pops up to remind me to get the thing out to defrost a couple of days before it is needed.
