101 Progress Check - October 27th 2013

Hi Guys,

Well, no tasks to cross off this week, although I have made a start on quite a few.

Sorting through the boys clothes - I have been through their drawers and wardrobe, and now have a whole big IKEA bag full of clothes to go to the clothing bank down the road. I have also been through most of the shoes and binned the old ones (they were hiding in the junk at the bottom of the stairs). I still need to go through all the hats, gloves, scarves, coats and snow trousers, and then I'm done - yay!!!

On Monday I started taking my iron supplements and fish oils, which reminds me, I really need to take those this morning as soon as I've finished writing this post.

I started reading Fanny Hill and am struggling to get into it at all - as it's such an old book the language style is so different from today and this makes it trickier. I was considering changing it for something else, but as I'm 25% of the way through then I shall keep going. So far though - it is just rude!!! lol

The main reason I haven't got further through Fanny Hill is that when I finished Black Beauty the new book by Alison Morton was launched. Perfiditas is the second book by Alison, her first, Inceptio, was launched earlier this year, and I have to say (because it's true, not because someone is making me), I just had to make this book my priority, and am so pleased I did. I loved reading Inceptio, I love the writing style, and the book is based on such an interesting idea and characters (I'm giving nothing away, just read the book), so was sure Perfiditas would also be good. I was a little concerned that it may not be able to live up to it's older sibling, but within minutes my fears were allayed as I held tight for more action, mystery and intrigue - love, love, love it!!!

Time to go take my supplements now - enjoy the recommended reading :-)

LJx

Update:     It is now Sunday evening and I have finished sorting the boys clothes, and started on the hallway cupboards - go me!!!

101 Progress Check - October 20th 2013

Hi Guys :-)

After I write my last progress update I had a good look at my list to see what was still outstanding, and how long I have left to get it all done in. I have approximately eight and a half months left, and thirty six items waiting to be completed and crossed off my list.

If I could do these at a rate of six per month I would easily get this finished, but there are a number of longer term things on here (e.g. there are still six date nights remaining, so realistically that is six evenings, not just one), so I went through the outstanding items to see which ones need to be spread out over the remaining time, and which can be given a date to be done as a one off and am very pleased to say that it is all looking possible :-)

You may recall that in my last update post I was considering a three month Facebook ban and a Keep In Touch project (to actually write to, or call people) during this period. I have decided that this is something that I would really like to do, and as there were a couple of items highlighted in my review of tasks to be changed that I had down as a "leave on the list for now", I feel that it would be right for me to swap out two of my current list items for these new ones. In a way I'm tempted to remove the job of transferring all my music from tape to MP3, and there are two reasons for this. Firstly, it will take a long time to do, and secondly, as I haven't used the converter yet I don't know if it actually works. However, it is something I really want to do, so I will leave it there and instead I will be removing two of my fitness items "Do 4 sessions of Your Shape (Kinect) or Wii Fit in one week" and "Do 3 sessions of Just Dance or Dance on Broadway in one week. With the fitness programmes that I have found in the last couple of years I feel that the Wii Fit & Your Shape don't really exercise me and so would be nice to do, but really a bit pointless, and I still have no idea where my dance games have gone...

This week I had planned to sort through the boys clothes, but it's not done yet. However, I have bought some more clothes for the boys ready for autumn/winter, and I may get a chance to at least start on sorting the clothes later today.

I read Black Beauty on the train to and from work this week. I have some vague recollections of watching it on telly when I was little, but had never read the book at all. I was surprised by how much I liked it - it is beautifully written from Black Beauty's point of view, and is just lovely. I have a feeling I will be reading this again in the future :-) So only two banned books left to read.

Yesterday I went out in the forest with the youngest boy as the older one had Jubla all afternoon, and we both took our cameras out with us and I was surprised this morning when I went to upload them and found that I had taken sixty four photos. Here are a few below:

On the way to the forest

In the forest - I love it here :-)

Marcus photographing mushrooms

Diddy mushrooms :-)

My happy boy :-)

 Tomorrow I will be starting taking my supplements (why start today what you can start tomorrow, lol), and as I'm changing my working hours from this week, and we no longer have Migros down the road to buy lunch so need to start planning properly what I'm eating and drinking again, I will be sorting out my Plannerisms planner to record everything as I know that when I am using it I am much better at keeping to routines and habits.

Have a great week,

LJx

2014 Diary Pages and Set Up

Check me out!!! Not even in the last month of the year and I'm thinking about my set up for next year - yes, I know, there are many of you out there that were set up and ready to go months ago, but for me this is very impressive. Please excuse the pictures, Ben has been using the timer on the camera and I have no idea how to turn it off, and getting the tripod out was not an option... oops!!!

Admittedly this decision was not something that has been plaguing me, and it was a snap decision that I made this morning, but I have a feeling that it's not going to come crashing down around my ears leaving my life in tatters :o)

When I saw the fabulous Debbie at the Philofaxy meet up at the end of September she gave me a set of A5 Gillio day to a page diary inserts (thank you Debbie!!!). So I did what any pretend organised person does and thought, fabulous - they'll be great for next year, I'll keep them wrapped up safe until then (see, pretend organised, a real organised person would have opened them up, put them in her Filofax/Gillio/other, and started writing in appointments and reminders the same day). But I was sat at my desk this morning, and there they were, looking at me - I'm sure they were bursting to get out of their wrapping.

Obviously, at this point I had to open them, I mean, come on, who could resist? I am so pleased to report that they are lovely. The day to a page layout has timed appointments 08:00 - 19:00 down the left hand side of the page, with space for tasks or other lists on the right, and spaces for notes and phone calls at the bottom of the page. Admittedly, I don't have many appointments, but I do like to assign time-slots to my tasks for the day in an attempt to get through as much as possible, and with this layout I can have a whole spaghetti junction of lines assigning tasks to time slots - awesome!!! As well as this there is also a memo page after each month so that non-date specific items for the following month can be jotted down ready for when you come to plan the days of that month, or maybe you could use it to note the highlights of your month so that at the end of each month you have a list of happy reminders.

The inserts come wrapped in two sections (Jan-Jun & Jul-Dec), I mean, who is going to want to carry around a full year of day to a page diary inserts...?  OK. maybe I will... but it's very sensible to split them into six month packages as many people don't want to carry that many.

Currently I have all my basic set up (personal & work) in my medium Gillio (personal sized in Filofax-speak), but as great as it s to carry just a personal around with me, when I saw this I realised I just have to move back to an A5 for work next year - I love them.

Having looked at them again I'm seriously considering lugging an A5 round with me everywhere again (not literally everywhere - it will be for work and home, not for me to take with me when we go shopping) and having my work and personal stuff in there.

The phone call section would also be perfect for a keeping in touch project, so I now definitely need to change my 101 list to avoid Facebook, and to keep in touch with people via letters and phone calls.

Time to get planning... thanks for stopping by :o)

LJx

101 Progress Check - 16th October 2013

Hi everyone :o)

Sorry for another lengthy pause between posts (maybe I should just aim to update monthly instead of weekly, so I don't have to feel so bad) - I've been away for two out of the last three weekends. Needless to say that progress is still slow.

I should have even done a post on my first weekend away as I was away with the Philofaxy gang and we were very privileged (don't laugh oh ye who are not of the Filofax persuasion) to be invited to the Filofax headquarters down at Burgess Hill where we had a fab time talking with the heads of various departments there, seeing potential new patterns for next year, fondling some of the older Filofaxes, and generally having fun. We all came away with a bag of Filofax goodies (and yesterday my friend also took delivery of a nappa Flex from them on my behalf - so looking forward to receiving that).

On the Saturday most of us headed to Vapiano (highly recommended - very relaxed atmosphere and lovely food cooked right in front of you), where we got to play with each other's Filofaxes, shortly followed by the obligatory shopping trip to Paperchase :o)  

Being up in London I got to see my brother, sister-in-law and their cool kids as well which was great - we lost touch for a while (nothing bad happened, we're both just utterly useless), so it's been nice to catch up again over the last six months or so.

Anyway, back to the topic of this post... although my 101 has been moving slowly recently I have two more tasks to cross off.

While we had a weekend free with no children around I went with my husband (I love saying that) to see Rasta Thomas's ballet of Romeo & Juliet - it was amazing, the music was cool, the moves were slick, and the bodies were hot... oops, did I just say that out loud?!!!

Before I went away last weekend I sorted through my stationery and packaged up seven RAKs - so that's another task that I've been meaning to do for ages that I can cross off my list - I'm sure if I hadn't put it on the 101 list it would still be waiting at the end of the year (and not necessarily just this year). This means that I can now leave the FiloRAK group. As much as I love the idea of the group, I just keep seeing lovely things, which send me off trawling the Internet, and the next thing I know it's three hours later and I've spent the whole evening looking at pretty stationery or crafty stuff.

I am seriously considering adding a three month Facebook ban to my 101 list (although I will still be allowed to check for private messages as this is how my family and friends contact me. Over the last couple of weeks my Facebook usage has been much less than previously, and it feels so nice not to feel that I must check into all the groups every day - in fact, I have left some already to remove the pressure (which is only from me, no-one else - just my own freakish OCD fault). There will be no checking groups or reading the news feed allowed, even though this does mean that I may miss out on actual news (not just the trash photos, hoaxes, game requests and adverts). Maybe I should also add a task to keep in touch with people and start writing letters and picking up the phone...

I finally got round to searching Amazon to get my three remaining banned books to read, so have downloaded Black Beauty and Fanny Hill (OMG, I wish I'd read the reviews before putting that on my list - I think it's just going to be rude!!!) onto my Kindle. Unfortunately Catcher in the Rye doesn't seem to be available on Kindle, so for now I've downloaded Uncle Tom's Cabin instead as this was banned in the Southern United States due to it's anti-slavery content. The Catcher in the Rye will definitely be read at some point though as I think my next reading challenge (either after the 101 list or alongside it) will be either the BBC top 200 or the Telegraph 100 - I'm sure there will be overlaps, and I'm also sure that I will have already read some of them, but I am looking forward to my next list of books :-)

That's me done for now, have a great week,

LJx