A Notable Week -- Sunday Serenity -- ROW80 Check-In

 

Handmade Leather Notebook

The notebook pictured is one of the treasures I bought at the artisan booths at the Highland Festival I attended last Sunday.  If you missed that post, which is likely because I posted well after midnight last Sunday, you might want to check it out as it was my favorite post all Round if not all year.

I love notebooks in general but hand made notebooks can actually raise my pulse.  I am often caressing them at these artisan booths or stores that sell on consignment but this is the first time I bought one.  I just could not resist.  The dreamcatcher, butterflies and feathers all have spiritual significance for me. 

Now I just need to figure out what to use it for.  And that will be a challenge as one of the reasons I've never bought one is that I know myself so well.  I know that the more I love a notebook the harder it is for me to put a mark in it.

I chose the notebook to preside over this week's post as it so relates to the theme of my week and the theme of this week's goal triumph.  A triumph I practically stumbled into or was pushed by circumstances.  The same circumstances that prevented me from posting a check-in Wednesday.

Last Wednesday I woke up to a glitchy computer.  Every mouse click or keyboard tap took forever to respond.  I spent more time watching spinning wheels, greyed out aps, and 'not responding' or 'end task' messages than I did doing tasks.  This caused me to be late to an important Zoom which had to be conducted except for the last ten minutes via phone. 

By late afternoon, I was worn out by hours of trying to get my computer to cooperate with me and possibly a bit by sleep deprivation so by dusk I was ready for bed.  Then I woke at 2am and opened my laptop and there on the screen was a dialog box saying that my computer needed to restart to install updates and a countdown clock that had about three minutes to go. 

Of course.  Doh!

Over the next day or two I got requests from several aps for installing updates.  So multiple companies were working in the background at the same time.  No wonder there was no RAM left for me.  Stop me before I start my rant about product service personnel invading our private spaces and commandeering our products at their whim. 

Would we tolerate it from our car dealership's mechanic?  Imagine finding your car in pieces in your garage as you rush out to head to work or school. I don't think so.  So why is it OK that once a month for several days the one device that is most integrated into our daily productivity can be made useless for hours on end?  

Ooops.  I ignored that stop sign.

So, returning to the story, I managed to get the two aps that might be irritated by a forced shutdown closed and then with a minute to go clicked 'restart now'.  Then I read for the nearly forty minutes it took to get back to my desktop.  It was what I found shortly after Chrome reloaded the twenty odd tabs that had been closed for the shutdown that put the ROW80 check-in off my radar. 

Open tabs often serve as my todo list and sometimes I don't close them when I'm done with the task so one of my habits after a restart and reloading of the closed window is to close the tabs I know I'm done with and remind myself what is urgent and to bookmark and close things that can wait.  This is how I discovered a tab I'd left as an urgent task but that had still gone off my radar weeks ago.

This was a tab to the Evernote site where I had been trying to find out how to unsubscribe from the paid version and whether the free version was still available and if not, what happens to my notes.  I'd been researching this after getting an email from them in mid August announcing that my annual payment was due on September 16th and it would be doubling.

As if that wasn't bad enough I learned by signing into my account trying to find answers that this had happened once before and I'd never known.  So I'd already been paying twice what I signed up for just before the pandemic for two years and now they were doubling it again?  No!  This is not sustainable on a fixed income.  Stop me before I go into a rant about the subscription economy and how it is creating a balkanized caste system of information haves and have nots.

But that isn't the theme of this post.  This is about me having a fire lit under me to rescue my notes in case I needed to deactivate my Evernote account in order to prevent the autopay from dinging my card on the 16th since I couldn't figure out how to stop the payment.  So at 3am I began moving my notes.

I identified three major types.  There was the web clippings that were either links alone or links with clipped portions of a page or links with notes added.  Then there were three types of text only notes: quotes, lists, writings of various lengths.  The links alone were easy.  I opened them and bookmarked them in the browser.  Links with more I found I could copy/paste to a Google Docs.  The very short text only stuff I copy/pasted to my sticky notes ap and the longer text pieces to Google Docs.

This project took most of twelve hours.  I had to stop and eat a couple times.  I had to stop and watch a screensaver for ten minutes before doing the 40 minute morning pages exercise about when my morning alarms started going off.  I had to stop briefly to get my caregiver started on her tasks.

I moved the last note just after 3pm.  There had been 120 odd.  No way that had been worth what I'd been paying. Not even what I had started out paying.  But that was because my life imploded just after I started the subscription so that I didn't use it how I'd envisioned.

I'd had big plans for it when I subscribed in 2019.  At that time I had multiple devices and was moving from room to room in Mom's house, going to appointments and spending part of every weekend with my husband.  I couldn't always have my laptop with me.  I'd just bought a Bluetooth keyboard that worked with all my devices except the laptop and thus it was finally possible for me to compose on my android devices wherever I found myself. 

I got to use Evernote as I imagined for only about three months before the pandemic which was just the beginning of the shakeups in my life.  Most of the relevant events are covered in the dwindling posts of those years.

After assuring the safety of my notes, I returned to the Evernote tab to start exploring my options once again.  The only thing like a FAQ was a Forum for asking questions and I had to register to join it.  Luckily my questions had already been asked and answered.  Yes the free version was still available and thus my notes would have still been accessible except that any very large ones could not be edited but I'd never uploaded or created anything large.  I would no longer have access via unlimited devices and my limit of data moved shrank considerably but again, I'd never needed the extra MB the way I'd been using it.  I am still unclear whether I can access via two or only one device.  Moving files between devices was one of the ways I used it.  But Google Docs works for that too.

As it turned out the majority of my notes had been via the Web Clipper browser extension and I think that will be the main way I use it going forward.  I discovered that Google Docs was a lot easier to use for the plain text as well as for text with hyperlinks and graphics. 

But if I'm going to start using Google Docs that way I'm going to have to perform a similar task with it as what I just did with Evernote.  Not a note rescue exactly unless you can call organizing files so you can find them when you need them a rescue.  I've been dropping stuff in there willy-nilly for ages.

Meanwhile I hope no one will quibble with me for giving myself a big YES for working with my FOS storyworld notes this week even though it was all done in a single day rather than spread out over the week.  Because the majority of those notes were related in one way or another to my storyworld project from reading notes, character or plot ideas, quotes, research, musings on theme, and even a very rough draft of a potential scene that I completely forgot existed.  Sigh.

Actually I'm thinking I need to rethink that goal for next round.  I was trying to train myself to have a daily or semi-daily habit but that doesn't take into account one of my autism related superpowers: to hyperfocus on one task for many hours.

That goal of 30 minutes five times a week also flies in the face of one of my autism challenges: the fact that changing channels in my mind takes twenty minutes.  Thus for a thirty minute task I'm lucky if I'm on task and productive for the last ten of it and then I'm irritated if I'm forced to quit and change focus again. 

A Round of Words in 80 Days
Round 3 2023

The writing challenge that
 knows you have a life

 ROW80 Round 3 Goals:

• Morning pages daily.  Average 40 minutes (ala Julia Cameron The Artist Way and Writing For Life) YES Started May 20.  Probably would not have jumped into NaNo and ROW80 without having had a month of morning pages behind me. But the very fact that I've hung on to this YES throughout the crisis' is PROOF that I am committed to the writing and still belong in ROW80.  Don't worry, I know the ROWers need no such prrof.  Only my Stella.
• Storydreaming with notebook for noting ideas for characters or scenes. (ala Robert Owen Butler From Where You Dream)  30 10 minutes per day 2/7  of a yes since last Sunday  (The notebook is the key to this goal as without it the storydreams go to the same place night dreams go an hour after waking.) Note: I've adjusted the goal for the duration of the round to ten minutes a day with the caveat that as long as I'm sitting with notebook and pen it counts even if I don't write anything new.
• Working on the Fruits of the Spirit (aka FOS) Storyworld Bible at least 30 10 minutes per day at least 5 days per week.  I'm sure this will expand as I get involved but I need to set a minimum for that jumpstart. BIG YES (with the caveat that it was all in one day.  see above)   (still hoping to make this and storydreaming  my ROW80 main project for the remainder of this round as I need a substantial start on it in time to use it for Preptober and NaNo next Round.)   Note: I've adjusted the goal to 10 minutes 5 days a week with the caveat that I don't need to work into the pristine spiral notebook I bought for this project yet.  The first task is to get a feel for how that notebook needs to be organized and to figure that out I will start re-reading my files with loose scratch paper or note cards at hand to note down every 'fact' I encounter as I read: names, dates, descriptions, titles of books and chapters and stories, character quirks, symbolism associated with a character...etc.  It occurred to me that my resistance to this task was at least partially related to not wanting to make a mess in that pretty notebook.  So now I have permission to make a mess with scratch pads and note cards.  Let's see if that makes any difference.  Also there is a trick I'm playing on myself here.  I almost never do a thing for only ten minutes but if I think I must do 30 minutes I balk at starting thinking of all the ways I'm likely to get interrupted or not fulfill my expectations in some unexpected way.  I realized this has to do with not being able to visualize exactly what is expected.  But I know what it means to 'read' and 'take notes'  I've been doing it with other people's stories every day for weeks and weeks.  For most of a year in fact.
• Weekly Artist Date (ala Julia Cameron)  This is about doing something to recharge your creative battery.  I'll go into more detail in one of the check-ins.  A big YES  More 24/7 cams discovered.  Also screensaver vids of color or image in motion.  Some with music excellent for background ambience for writing. 
• A minimum of 5 minutes of physical activity daily.  Either a walk outside with my caregiver or a session on my mini-tramp, or pacing the floor between front and back door. YES (may need to look at upping the expectation soon.  this is getting too easy.)  
• I want to reengage with my blog so: Two One blog post per week besides the two check-ins. Either about encountering other people's stories via print, video or audio which can include formal reviews or about a current fiber art WIP or about one of my personal challenges: widowhood, independent living with visual impairment and autism and issues related to health and aging among them.  Not yet.  Note: I've adjusted my expectations here for the duration of the round.  I removed the theme of personal challenge from the options as it turns out that has been the theme of my check-in posts and those take a lot out of me and a third one would be overloading my readers as well as me.  The main reason I've not posted extra is the same reason I missed the Wednesday check-in: The note rescue caper.  Plus I'm still super busy chasing library book due dates and trying to finish books before the next set of holds comes back my way.  I sometimes feel like I'm chasing my own ponytail around the 440 track. Boy do I miss the days when I could read 100 pages an hour or better.