Happy birthday to me!

Today I turned forty-two, which as we all know, is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.  (Read Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if you don’t believe me.)  Alas, I feel no wiser than yesterday, but at least it’s a cool age to be, if only for a year!

Being a notorious party girl, of course,  I celebrated by installing shelves in my closet, sorting out piles of random stuff, and running a bazillion house-related errands.  Fully organizing my studio is proving elusive!  Just as I think I’ve got a handle on it, more Stuff creeps out of a corner.  And setting up new infrastructure (like the shelves) to organize the Stuff can easily take half a day.

But I am working patiently at it, organizing things and tying up loose ends.  A website/service called Trello has been a wonderful support for me in keeping track of the to-dos – it’s basically a Web-based Scrum board, listing tasks in columns (default is “To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done”).  Tools like this are a dime a dozen these days, but the wonderful thing about Trello is its pure simplicity – click in a column, type in the task, hit return, and you’re done.  And you can drag and drop to reorder the tasks, or move them from one column to another.  That simple.

Anyway, I’ve been using Trello with four columns: “To Do Later”, “To Do Today”, “Doing”, and “Done”.  This lets me keep track of all the things I’d like to do eventually, but focus on the things I’m actually doing today.  “Doing” shows what I have in progress, and the “Done” column tracks shows what I’ve finished.  (It’s totally unnecessary, but it cheers me up to see the “Done” column growing!)  I really like it.

Tomorrow B. and I are going up to San Francisco to celebrate my birthday.  (We’d have gone tonight, but the SF Giants are playing a home game tonight, and neither of us felt like contending with 10,000 baseball enthusiasts.)  We’re going to one of my favorite restaurants – a Japanese sukiyaki and shabu-shabu place.  I adore sukiyaki, especially when it’s cooked at the table, and I’ve missed this restaurant badly ever since we moved out of the city.  So we’re going there.  It’s not fancy, but it’s comfort food, and it will be a nice place to celebrate.

Back to organizing samples!  I put away about 150 samples yesterday before running out of sheet protectors, but more sheet protectors and binders arrived today, and I still have an eight-inch stack to contend with.  Hopefully I can finish those up by the time B. finishes fixing some stuff around the house, and then we can go off for sushi and some wonderful Indian ice cream, in lots of exotic flavors.