1. How do you handle tagging multi-artist albums?
For instance I have a bunch of split albums and the artists don’t necessarily collaborate on the songs. So I think I should put which artist did the recording in the Artist tag but then sorting by artist ends up with a bunch of weird half albums but I am not sure that matters. And then there’s the question of songs that have other artists on them like Billy Joe Shaver’s “Get Thee Behind Me Satan” with John Michael Montgomery. If I add in John Michael’s name then I have a new “Artist” with one song and not an accurate Artist to boot. So I am thinking that the Comments field might be the place for this sort of information but I don’t know. And then there’s compilation albums. Maybe the answer to my question is to sort by Album but so many music players don’t allow a tag for compilation anywhere and I end up with seventeen albums with the same name and one song each.
2. How anal retentive are you about genre tags?
Another one I am torn on. Do I care about the difference between Red Dirt, Texas Country, Outlaw Country, Country, Classic Country, Alt Country, and probably a few more that I haven’t even thought to include? I do use the Genre tag in sorting and sometimes in smart playlists but how granular should I be? And are genres arbitrary or is it easier than I am making it? Is Tim Barry Alt Country, Americana, Folk, Rock, or some other sub-genre I missed. And what is the difference between Americana and Folk, and can a Canadian artist be Americana?
3. If you use Linux what do you use for your music player/organizer?
I am currently using gmusicbrowser and miss Amarok but the new version sucks balls. No player since has matched the smart capability, the options, and the sheer usability of the old Amarok. I think gmusicbrowser could catch up as it’s a young project and the maintainer is active and considers suggestions but it lacks some of my favorite features. So if you have a suggestion that’s not Amarok, Banshee, or Rhythmbox then please let me know. On a side note I think I’ll review gmusicbrowser this week, like with screenshots and everything. Oh and if you use Windows or Mac and get an urge to suggest iTunes for organizing a large music collection then I reserve the right to mock you for iTunes and for using Windows.

So there you have it. If any of the three you want to weigh in I would appreciate it. Meanwhile I’ll suffer through inaccurate tag information as best I can.

I have already posted on using Google Calendar’s multiple calendar feature to compartmentalize your life to cut down on chaos and I am still using the methods I mentioned in that post but I have added to them based on screwing up my budget once again. So my suggestion today is simple. Put anything outside of your normal budget into a Google Calendar on the day you intend to spend the money. Since I am married we use the invite system to approve expenditures. For instance if my wife wants to buy a new washing machine she puts it into the calendar on the day she wants to buy it and sends me an invite. I can then look at the item and if I accept the invite then we don’t have to talk about the purchase. If we just plain can’t afford it then I can decline the invite or if we need to talk about it I can say Maybe to the invite. Using this system you can add up all your non-normal expenditures for each month and put them into your budget to see if your are crazy or if you can afford everything you want to do. Using this system also eliminates the “I didn’t know you were going to do that” issues that some couples struggle with.

In the end this is an easy system to combine with You Need A Budget which is the next item on the Life Management post series. I don’t know if these posts are helping anyone but I enjoy writing them so they will keep coming.

Don’t sweat the medium stuff! What I mean by that is don’t let things like I did this week make you feel like your life is out of control. I made a commitment to myself to post three times a week and on specific topics. This week that didn’t happen and while I wish that it had I am alright with prevented it from happening. Sometimes life happens and you will just have to roll with it. I rolled with it this week and will when it happens again. I don’t say “if” because I have met me and I know it will. Make sure to acknowledge that life will throw you curve balls and don’t allow you happiness to rely on perfection because you ain’t perfect and don’t know anyone who is.

Since I am writing this on my cell phone I am going to end this missive here so I don’t get thumb cramps. I’ll toss up some pics of Seamus hooked into the EEG later on. Have a great weekend y’all.

Before I talk about my epiphany I am going to make an admission here that I have never made in public before. It is apropos to the topic at hand but very hard for me to type out and have here for everyone to see and pass judgement on me for my actions. I cheated on my wife. I had never cheated on anyone I had even dated when this happened. I had been what a good friend of my called a serial monogamist. I won’t go into the details because they don’t matter. Suffice to say that shortly after we were married I broke my vows to her. It goes without saying that I didn’t handle the situation well from start to finish and it culminated with me doing something I had sworn I would never do. When all was said and done I went home and confessed my sin to my wife and prepared for the worst. I expected yelling and screaming and even possibly having to find a new place to sleep for a while. What I got was forgiveness. It was instant and without second thought. There was no yelling, no banning me from our apartment. She simply and completely forgave me and has never once held it against me. Her forgiveness tore my heart out and made me feel worse than any other thing she could have done. Now this was not her intent but it’s the truth of the matter. It was hard and took me much longer to accept that she had forgiven me than it did for her to do so.

What brought this to my mind was typing out my explanation of how prosecuting people that tacitly approved torture are looked the other way would provide them absolution whereas forgiving them and letting them deal with their conscience could provide a harsher punishment in the long term. I realized, over the past couple of days thinking about it, that human beings have a need to be punished for our crimes or sins so that we feel we can accept forgiveness. It is hard for us to accept that we can just be forgiven for something we have done that hurt someone, broke someone’s trust, and so on. We don’t feel worthy of being forgiven without some of retribution being meted our upon us. Sure we can logically accept forgiveness as offered and once accepted we may even believe the forgiving party has truly let go of our slight against them but we tend not to forgive ourselves for the slight even after forgiveness is offered by the offended party.

In the season premier of House we watched Dr. House struggle to tell someone who was injured by reckless decision that he was sorry. This was not the standard Dr. House diagnostic mistake but rather a completely different situation that you’ll have to watch the episode to see. In the dialog with Dr. House and his shrink we saw that the root of the problem was not that Dr. House did not want to apologize out of arrogance but rather out of guilt. He did not believe he had any right to let go of his mistake and move on. He did want forgiveness but rather wanted to mentally flagellate himself over his mistake. An apology, even without forgiveness, allows us a chance to move past our mistakes. Once offered and if offered in earnest an apology places the onus on the slighted party. If forgiveness is refused then we must, morally, move past our mistake while taking care to not repeat whatever thing we did. I say that we have a moral imperative to move on because if we don’t then allow other’s to place baggage in our life that is not ours to bear.

Now I must tread carefully here because a simple “I’m sorry” is not enough for many situations. An apology should fit the circumstances and must be offered in earnest. If we wreck a friend’s car and leave them without transportation while their car is fixes then a simple verbal apology may be a slap in the face that requires it’s own apology later. When we apologize we seek forgiveness and as such we must be prepared to make restitution and if we are not then our apology is not worth acceptance. I do not advocate allowing apologies not given in earnest or not fitting the situation to give us permission to walk away from someone we have slighted.

Offering a true apology befitting the situation and doing so with earnest places us in a position where we can forgive ourselves for our mistakes. And that is the hardest part of forgiveness. Forgiving yourself. Human beings are not well equipped to forgive ourselves and, as mentioned earlier, feel a need for some horror to be dealt to us that is worse than whatever we have done to another. This what we must move past in our lives. We must learn to forgive ourselves. I don’t have any words of wisdom on how to accomplish this task but merely know that we must.

On the flip side of that coin we should accept apologies without reservation regardless of whether or not they fit the situation. We should dole out forgiveness with ease and do so truly and completely. We should be willing to give forgiveness without any apology whatsoever. If we do not then we create emotional and spiritual baggage for ourselves that will affect all aspects of our life. I know from my own life experiences that holding a grudge or stoking hatred in your heart will leave you a shell of the person that you could, and are supposed to, be. Holding grudges can lead to your immune system functioning at lower efficiency and put you in bed sick. I won’t bother citing the studies here because I am lazy but there are plenty that show that angry people end up sick more often than happy people. So even ignoring the mental issues that refusing forgiveness brings with it there are health concerns as well.

All of this metal rumination led to me realizing that we, as humans, have a huge amount of trouble believing we can be forgiven for our sins. Even once we accept that the Gospel we still seek ways in which to be punished for our sins. I don’t doubt you heard all the Evangelical blow hards after 9/11, the major typhoon, hurricanes Ike and Katrina, or any other given disaster claiming that those events were God’s punishment because we are evil people who deserve bad things. I tell you that those blow hards have it wrong. They want those things to be true because it would mean that being forgiven comes with a price but it doesn’t. Scripture says that God disciplines his children but it never says he tosses horrors down from heaven on believers and non-believers alike. God’s forgiveness is there for the asking and he doesn’t require us to flog ourselves or wear hair shirts to get it. We just have trouble believing that we could be forgiven that easily and that’s a shame.

Even if you aren’t a Christ Follower everything above the previous paragraph is applicable to your life. I am trying to write these pieces to be applicable to everyone regardless of their religious beliefs. Forgiveness and apologies are a key part of managing our personal lives and we should work on forgiving with ease and earnest, accepting forgiveness, and perhaps most importantly forgiving ourselves. If we practice these things then we will walk through our lives with a few more smiles and be more pleasant to those around us. Let go of your grudges, forgive old boyfriends and girlfriends, let go of your spite for your mother not being perfect, and let yourself accept your failures and move past them. You might not think it will help but I promise you it can’t hurt.

To do evil for good is human corruption; to do good for good is civil retribution; but to do good for evil is Christian perfection. Though this be not the grace of nature, it is the nature of grace. – Archbishop Secker

(Title quote by Mahatma Gandhi)

Let’s back up just a little bit and see where this all started. Recently my company, not the oil and gas company where I work every day but the company that writes my paycheck, switched to Google Apps to email, calendering, and all that rot. I have been a GMail user for years now and love the interface. I use labs features in my email and calendar, prefer Google Reader to most other RSS apps, and so on. So this switch didn’t have any learning curve for me and in fact was sort of exciting as it meant I could easily do things that were slightly more complex using locally hosted email; things like writing email filters so I didn’t end up with hundreds of emails from my mailing lists on my mobile device every day. Now I already had three GMail addresses, although one I don’t use much these days, and this move added another G-sort-of-thing. Never having used Google Calendar for anything and not wanting to have my personal phone use the Exchange server at work I set out figuring out how to sync my Exchange calendar with my new “work” Google Calendar. As it turns out a quick search turned up Google Sync which works flawlessly with a single drawback, you have to be logged in somewhere with it running to update, that isn’t all that horrible. So now I have my corporate Exchange syncing with my Google Calendar. That’s the easy part…

So next is getting this information over to my HTC Touch Pro which is getting replaces on Oct. 11, 2009 and that replacement will solve the issues described here without the mashup I have to use now. This is also not hard and is simply another piece of Google Sync and it merely pretends to be an exchange server. Ignoring the known issues you can also only sync Calendar and Contacts. So there is no task or to-do list sync and GMail, or hosted Google Apps Mail, still is IMAP (you can use POP3 but why would you?). With those caveats the sync works great. Since I do my to-do lists in my books it doesn’t bother me one bit that it doesn’t sync to my phone. In fact I think alerts for my to-do list would probably just annoy me.

So in light of using Google Calendar I had the idea that I would set up a personal calendar on one of my other accounts to cover my home commitments, shows I want to see, and so on. I then shared this calendar with myself, on my work account, and all of a sudden I had a view where I could see all of my work and personal commitments and no-one else could see them together. On top of that I shared my personal calendar with my wife and allowed her to add and change events so she has a way to let me know what she wants and needs done without me having to remember to add it anywhere. She is also setting up a calendar and sharing it with me so I’ll know the things she wants to and places she wants to go. Of course we are moving her domain e-mail to Google Apps so everything for her will be a single login. My accounts are separate so I can use one for consulting, one for personal, and one for anything that might get me spammed. But I digress…

With all of this sharing setup I exported my contacts from my personal account, imported them to my work account, removed my old Active Sync partnership, went out to the garage to smoke, since I get no reception down here in the basement, and added my work account as my Active Sync server. About three minutes later, I have a lot of contacts, I had my work calendar and my contact list on my mobile device again. But there was a problem. It only synced the events from my “main” calendar. It didn’t pull in anything off of the calendars I was using that were shared from other accounts. This was not the solution I wanted by any stretch so research ensued. It turns out that’s the way it works, at least at the moment, and my options were to “import” the other calendars and allow everyone I shared my work calendar with to see my personal schedule or to find a third party method, if one existed, to sync my calendars. Of course I am not going use the import option because the only reason this system appeals to me is that I can compartmentalize work and home. So off I went to find a solution…

There are a few solutions out there and I haven’t tried all of them, and won’t since I go Andriod in less than a month, but the free service from NuevaSync allows you to select up to eleven calendars from a single Google Account, you are limited to one account so you still have to share calendars, and works with hosted Google Apps so I gave it a shot. There is some quirkiness in TouchFlo interface as it tells me I have no events scheduled today but if you look at the calendar it shows everything from all the calendars you select. I think this is a TouchFlo problem but since I won’t have to deal with this in less than a month I am not bothering to track down a solution. Alerts work just fine and for all calendars so I have exactly what I need. I did have to delete my Active Sync partnership with my Google account and add NuevaSync as the partnership but that was just another couple of minutes. The only annoyance is that all my contacts, over 200, are sorted first name first when I had them sorted last name first. While that is an annoyance it is not a deal breaker for me.

The end result of all of this is that I have a single screen where I and I alone can see all of my personal and work commitments, two different corporate schedules syncing, a shared space for scheduling with my wife, and total compartmentalization. The drawbacks are few but include having to have Outlook connected somewhere and Google Sync running on that machine to get updates to one of the corporate calendars, TouchFlo not working quite exactly as it should, and my contacts having their sort order swapped. In the end it’s a mashup solution to a problem a lot of people probably don’t have and there are paid solutions for the multiple calendar sync issue that look better than the free solution I ended up choosing that support things multiple Google accounts but the solution works well for me and likely will for anyone save the most anal retentive among us. However if you are looking for a solution like this, can change phones, and have a carrier that has an Andriod phone then everything I typed here is solved by going to Android. This is of course my final solution since Sprint is releasing the HTC Hero on Oct 11 and I will have one in grubby little hands before that day is over.

I highly recommend compartmentalizing your life. If you are anything like me it’s too easy for work to spill over into your home life and that only damages your family relationships, your social life, and if you are less disciplined it spills both ways and then you damage your career. Using shared calendars, regardless of whether you choose Google for the task, allows you a single point of reference while still allowing separation. Using a cloud based system like Google Apps and allowing your spouse access creates a nice alternative to having to keep everything in your head and inevitably forgetting something of importance. I can’t stress compartmentalization enough and finding a system that syncs with each part of your life to a central point can be the key to making it work long term.

Moleskine

I use this book to keep track of my work life. I usually don’t put stuff about home into it unless it is something I have to take care of from the office. However this book, and the method I use, keep me from getting off track at work and let me manage my time quite nicely. The system I am using now is slightly different than the one I used at my last job but is the same system modified for the environment at current job. Most jobs are not as strange work-flow-wise as my current job so I while I will describe what I am doing now this post is about the system I modified and not my modifications.

First and foremost this system involves writing. There is psychological component to writing things down, and I mean putting pen to paper, that helps people remember things. This component doesn’t exist when typing or keeping notes on a PDA/cell phone/MID. So while I am a geek with an always on connection, a cell phone that can be wireless router, and plenty of online tools I still keep a notebook and everyone I have convinced to try this method is still keeping their notebook. The basic method is nothing more than making a daily task/to-do list and taking notes. This is done like so:

1. Use two pages per day, facing pages so that you have both pages open when your notebook is on your desk.
2. Every morning copy the tasks from the prior day’s task list to the new day’s task list on. I prefer the right hand page for this because it’s where your eyes naturally fall.
3. Prioritize your task list. I use arrows to do this: Up is high priority, down is low priority, left is medium priority.
4. Under the task list, leaving room to add more tasks, make any notes you need to accomplish your tasks.
5. The left hand page is for taking notes during the day and keeping track of time if you are required to do so.

That’s it. That’s the whole system in a nutshell. It takes discipline to do this every morning but if you do you’ll end up knowing how much bandwidth you have and you’ll always know what’s on your plate. This is handy for when your boss pops in to your cube and says “I need X done right away”. You can glance at your book and reply: “I can do that but Y and Z will have to be put off and I may miss those deadlines”. Keeping track of everything you have to do is daunting at first but the task list shouldn’t be little day to day stuff, that’s what notes are for. It shouldn’t be pieces of projects but the whole project. Your notes are where you keep your progress for any given project. The task list is a 5,000 ft overview so to speak. If you try to keep a list of every phone call you need to make and every e-mail you need to send you’ll drive yourself crazy and use a lot more than two pages a day.

My current job doesn’t lend itself to a daily list as such. Most of what I do is long term projects with shifting priority and sprinkled with short term tasks that crop up day to day. Doing the day to day was not working out well since everything is so dynamic. So I keep a weekly notebook of sorts. I have a task list that is copied every two pages but it might take three days to fill up two pages. My task list doesn’t grow rapidly and some things won’t fall off or be completed for months. So I make a master task list every two pages and take notes as needed. This is efficient for the way the work-flow at this job comes down the pipe. I do make a new master list every Monday whether I need it or not, mark that page with a post-it flag, and copy any relevant notes. Of course this is mostly because our team meetings are on Monday. If the team meetings were another day I would probably start a new section on that day instead.

While this system is dead simple don’t let that fool you. Sometimes the simple and easy things are what we need to manage our time. In this day and age it seems strange to keep a notebook but don’t worry about that. Trust me when I tell you that writing things down will help you remember them and that keeping a notebook will change the way you think about your available time. This system pretty much saved my arse before I got diagnosed with ADD and started taking medication for it. And furthermore it helps me not get hyperfocused on any one task now that I can actually focus on things. I know I said I don’t keep things about my home-life in my notebook except for minor exceptions but I do buy the three packs of squared, cardboard cover, Cahier Journals for home projects and the like. When you have a project at home that will be done over time this system can really help you sort out how long it will take and how to best arrange your time to get it done. You don’t have to buy Moleskine although I do recommend it simply due to their quality. You’ll notice the links on here don’t contain any sort of affiliate code or anything so my recommendation is simply that. They are good quality notebooks.

There you have it. My first post on life management. I know it’s kind of more like what I said I wasn’t going rather than my struggles to get my life in order but you’ll notice through the post that this notebooking system is soemthing that allowed me to get my work life in order and be much better at my job and much better at planning. I sort of present the solution here and not much of the problem but trust me the problem was huge for me. I hope that some of you get some of you find this useful.

First: some history on how we have always treated Christmas in the Potter household. I have never told my children there was a Santa Claus. We play the myth and even give gifts from Santa but we always stressed that it is just fantasy. The older children have even been known to correct adults on the subject. (I have no idea where they got the idea that they should correct people!) We do read Santa stories and enjoy the game but it has always been known to be fantasy. The oldest three are certain there is no Santa, the middle child is pretty sure there is despite what we have said, the three year old is unsure of may things including the reality of Santa and the youngest two are not of age to really believe in anything much.

Today I have decided to change how we deal with Santa. I did so after reading this article by Tony. Here’s a brief snippet:

I know Caleb and his brothers will figure out the Santa secret eventually, but I’m with Chesterton in resisting the elevation of science and reason to the exclusion of magic, of mystery, of faith. That’s why I’m not giving up on Santa without a fight. Not everything we believe, I explain to Caleb, can be proved (or disproved) by science. We believe in impossible things, and in unseen things, beginning with our own souls and working outward. It’s a delicate thing, preparing him to let go of Santa without simultaneously embracing the notion that only what can be detected by the five senses is real.

Tony hits me twice in this article with men I respect and turn to when the mysteries inherent in Christianty have my spinning: GK Chesterton and CS Lewis so he gets points on that alone. His reasoning behind not killing the myth for your children hit me like a brick. I had never thought about Santa from angle in which he is presented by Tony and I found myself in agreement. My lovely wife pointed out that we don’t tell the children that their imaginary friends (or in Sinead’s case “madge friends”) aren’t real. While Michelle doesn’t necessarily agree with me on the Santa decision she is willing to walk down this road with me (that alone is worth mentioning because she is always willing to go down whatever road I choose) (Or maybe she is just willing to give me enough rope to hang myself).

I have called the oldest three over and let them know we won’t be correcting the youngest four on the subject anymore and used the beautiful example of imaginary friends with them. They all agreed and next year there will be much Santa myth in the Potter household.

I told Michelle that if they asked that we wouldn’t lie. That we would answer completely honestly: Santa Claus is the anthropomorphization of the Christmas Spirit. Her only caveat was that if one of our children and pronounce “anthropomophization” that we would just go ahead and tell them the truth. Otherwise the simple explanation is that “Santa is the Spirit of Christmas” when they can’t grasp the whole concept of anthropomorphization. I think it’s a good caveat if only because I will get to hear at least four of my beautiful children pronounce anthropomorphization.

As an aside and only related tangentially: Ever since I learned about the real Saint Nicholas – Bishop of Myra the scene Tony Mentions: Father Christmas appears in Narnia as the White Witch’s spell is breaking: “‘I’ve come at last,’” says Santa. “‘She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last.’” I don’t see a jolly fellow dressed in red with a belly full of jelly. I see the same grim determination that must have been on his face as he crossed a room in 325 to slap the heretic Arius across the face. I see that scene as a triumph and the man making that statement as a man who had never given up trying to get into Narnia after the White Witch cast he awful spell. I don’t know, it just seems right to me.

And the last aside is thus: Many of my friends either commented on my note publicly, sent me private messages, or called me. Normally this has little effect on the Mark-Potter-Patented-Christmas-Funk-That-May-Be-Worse-Than-Tom’s but this year some of your words actually made a difference. This year I was pulled back from the brink. Not soon enough to kill some of my wife’s joy (and for that I am sorry) during our attendance of her family’s Christmas Eve event but enough to bring me back from the brink prior to Christmas Eve being over. You may never all know who you are but I am grateful. I have wonderful friends and a wonderful family. Thank you all and I hope that you all had an amazing Christmas I know I did.

Then there came the bad blood between my youngest sister and me. I will not go into that or anywhere else but suffice to say it exists. So it has been years since I was able to see my family on Christmas day or eve for that matter. Michelle’s family stresses me out even though it seems that after eight years they might have finally accepted my oldest children and me. For instance: one year her grandmother was giving people hugs before she left. She hugged on of Michelle’s brothers, looked at me, and hugeed the next person on her way out of the house. I don’t care how much they like or respect me now that behavior still hurt and not once did anyone apologize nor will they. Don’t get me wrong her brothers and Granny are great.

So why did I finally succumb to the old feelings I have fought so hard against? One may wonder…

Well in the midst of all this was always the Christmas party at Lee and Sarah’s house on Christmas eve. I have been doing that since before my oldest child was born. This year Michelle’s mom is having the family gathering on Christmas eve in the evening, I have to work, and Granny won’t even be there. So I have to work Christmas eve, not even at the office, drive 60+ miles to her mom’s house (where I won’t get to see the person I look forward to the most), and if I get there on time have Christmasb dinner, open gifts, then drive 30 miles to a party that’s halfway (if not more) over.

Christmas day we have awesome plans. (Thanks Chris!) But we are also broke so the presents the kids get to open were a shock even to me as two co-workers bought all the kids gifts. I am looking forward to Christmas dinner but after that it’s back home and a doc appointment the next day.

So it boils down to this: I have to skip most of my tradition to hang out with people who may or may not like me after working all day and I don’t get to see my family at all. The only bright spot is Christmas dinner with the Stelhorn clan.

I managed to not dread Christmas pretty much since Thanksgiving. I held it in check. That all fell apart when they told I had to work at the datacenter tomorrow. I hadn’t even been upset about missing most of the party or not seeing my family. Straw that broke the camel’s back and all that…

And baby you know I love you with everything I am but given a choice I would go to the party.

I am changing the way I think about money, changing the way we school the kids, changing the way I handle going to church, one more change shouldn’t be an issue. I think I am in a state of flux right now. Some sort of weird fugue state without the memory loss. I feel the changes. It’s uncomfortable to be honest to but the changes are for the best.

I know I haven’t been lighthearted lately and likely won’t. I have a lot of things to work out. I need a space in which to work them out and this is it. All those uncomfortable feelings associated with change, the panic, and so on. The dysfunctional personality who knows what needs to change and tries hard not to change anything.

I need to stop going out. I need to stay clear during these changes. I need to slip back into Warcraft as an alternative or get the bitter geek to throw a game or play poker (once we get money worked out). Going out leaves my head cloudy for a couple of days and every time as of late I have come home thinking not about what a great time I had but about how much I should stop. This is a huge change for me. This is huge for me to admit stone cold sober and not hungover in the least. I think this will be the hardest change overall. It may be easy in the short term but making it happen long term may be problematic. I can pull back when I need to short term but long term I always end up going out again. I don’t mean every once in a while but on a regular basis. I can always go out every once in a while. I don’t need to go out on a regular basis. I need to find more happiness at home and not outside of the house. I like my friends and when I say going out I don’t mean going to people’s homes.

Wow that was long and probably mostly pointless. Maybe there is some insight into what I am thinking for those who might say a prayer for me.

The kids have decided to push back and are not obeying anything. Bad time for that for them to pull that. I am handing out groundings for a week or longer because they need to shape up. The rebelled against momma all week and I am not standing for it. If we end up having to hunker down here without power for more than a day I need them in line and not screwing up. We aren’t playing games right now. As much as I don’t seem concerned, and I am really not, this is a serious situation and if I turn out to be wrong I can’t have insubordination running rampant through my children.

On a happy note I have a ton of music I can listen to, the cable modem has a battery, and we have three laptops with fully charged batteries. So if the internat comes back up before the lights I can still get online and in the meantime use the laptops to play music when things get too mind-numbingly boring.

Of course all the local channels are doing storm coverage which sucks. All it does it get people scared.  I checked and Alicia didn’t flood this neighborhood and we aren’t in the area that will be affected by the surge and we will likely get only tropical storm force winds so the only worry we have is electricity. I don’t think we will really have the lights out for long.

As for food we have a ton of non-perishables and I splugred and bought fun snacks because if we do have to use the food to survive at least it will be a break in the boredom. As you can see my biggest worry is boredom at this point, I plan to fight it tooth and nail if I have to.

I did get word from work that if I don’t have power I am not expected to fly out on Sunday even if the airports are open. I doubt my flight will even be available if they are open. Anyway there’s a post…it ain’t much of one…but it’s a post…