Sophistik8

Image courtesy of Krissy Mayhew on Flickr

Well, I haven’t done a very good job of keeping my new year’s resolutions from last year…so this year I am making the resolution to keep resolutions.  About the only goal I actually accomplished was getting my 11 piercings and my tattoo on 11/11/11!!! (and no you can’t see a picture just yet!)

So this year we are going to try again with some slight tweaks:

1.  Practice gratitude every day.  Write down three things that you are thankful for, before bed every day.  This will require the purchase of a brand new moleskin notebook.  I always do better when I have brand new office supplies to help!

2.  Read 110 books!  Last year I set a goal to read 100 books and I have fallen short!  A week before New Year’s and I have only read 90 books.  So I will make up that deficit in 2012.  Suggestions of short books are appreciated! (plus I am going to read all of the Alex Award winners, adult books with teen appeal, so I have something to discuss with grown ups at cocktail parties)

3.  Take time out to spend with my new husband/old boyfriend/brief fiance.  With deadlines looming and work to be done sometimes it is easy to get caught up in my professional organizations (YALSA), or work, or derby, but I need to remember the most important deadline of all…December 21, 2012, when, according to the Mayans, the world will end.  And when it does, I want to go out with the love of my life and no regrets.

And now all I need to do, is actually keep my resolutions!

I crack myself up.  If you have been wondering where I have been, I have been off being married!  And to prove it I have pictures!

P.S. after the holidays I should be back to my normal update schedule.  Isn’t it funny that when you have a lot going on you never have time to tell anyone about it?

It is hard to believe that I have one week of derby left in 2011!  This season has been a whirlwind, but so has the rest of my life.  It will be nice to put some other priorities first for a while, like planning this pesky wedding and reading 80 books by the end of June.  Everything is moving right along, plans going relatively smoothly, now all I need to do is manage to squeeze a few more minutes into every day to spend with my fiancee and I should be fine!

What will I be taking time out of my busy schedule to do in June?

• I will take an evening to see X-Men: First Class because I have loved the X-Men for as long as I can remember!  I used to go to all the midnight showings (but now I am getting old, how sad is that).
• A trip to Ryan’s relatives boat in Oklahoma.  I hope to use this as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: reading on the boat and tanning at the same time (I will break the photographer’s camera if I am this white for my wedding).
• ALA Conference in New Orleans.  I am looking forward to seeing lots of librarian friends, meeting some amazing authors, having some awesome discussion and coming home with tons of ideas to enact at my library!

It is going to be a busy month, I am looking forward to July!

Dear person whom I haven’t called/texted/emailed in months,

I am sorry if you have thought that I have been lying dead in a ditch somewhere.  It isn’t that I didn’t mean to not call/text/email you, it is just that I have had waaay to much on my plate recently and some stuff started to spill off the edges.  But I promise that I am not dead, unfortunately you won’t be getting a call/text/email from me for while.  This is why; in the next several months I have to:

• plan and execute a wedding (not as easy as it sounds. Ha!)
• read almost 100 books for a committee that I am on for one of my library associations
• win a derby championships (our team is undefeated and I do not plan on that ending with me)
• work (to pay for the above)
• hopefully, at some point, see my fiance.  Despite the fact that we live in the same house, we rarely see each other, so if I have a moment when I am not making a centerpiece, reading a book, skating or working I will be snuggling with my sweety, so that he remembers who that lady at the end of the aisle is when the time comes.

So it isn’t personal, I love you, I really do, but I might as well be dead for the next couple of months.  But I promise that when my corpsified body climbs out of the ground, you are the first person that I will call/text/email with my decomposing fingers.  And don’t think that I won’t miss you during this time apart, but trust me, I will be a much more awesome person to talk to in September that I am right now.

Sincerely,

Kate

P.S. if I do actually return as a zombie please double tap me in the head, don’t play around with zombies.

So I am co-captain for the KCRW Plan B travel team.  It is an interesting experience, largely made up of flying by the seat of my derby skins.  But so far it has been fun.  There are a lot of unexpected bumps along the way, trying to decide what drills to run, where to put people in the pack were things that I expected.  Making sure everyone has a room at the hotel, letting the other team know how many refs we are bringing, organizing a fundraiser for new uniforms, were not things that I expected.

But the things that are difficult are where you really grow and learn.  So I am going to keep pushing through and figure this out.  I am guess I should get it all under control right around Easter when it will be time for another Captain and Co-Captain to take over.  I on the other hand will gently drift into wedding land as I scale back my other commitments and get ready to become Mrs. PicNair.  If you are interested you should come check us out tomorrow in Jeff City, playing the COMO Derby Dames (don’t ask me why the Columbia team plays in Jeff City, it is a mystery).

There has been a pretty long haired cat hanging around our house for the past couple of weeks (possibly because I might have fed her one morning when I just couldn’t take it anymore).  Bruno has taken quite the shine to her and is constantly looking for her outside.  He spends the rest of his time pining for her.  I guess someone has a new girlfriend!

I gotta tell you, I love me some kinetic typography.  Here are some of my favorite videos from recent memory.

I can relate to this one, with a boyfriend who spends more time drooling over his new shop vac than hanging out with me.

This video was released for Cee Lo’s newest  hit, just a couple of weeks before his official video came out.  I loved it from the first moment I saw/heard it.  So damn catchy!

One of the most recent.  This is the visualization of the dramatization of a video game rant.  Originally posted as a horribly misspelled review to Super PSTW Action RPG, I like this version much better! (please note that the voice acting is supplied by an actor from the game)

That’s right.  It is 2011 which means my goal of 11 piercings by 11/11/11 is fast approaching.  Today I worked toward that goal by getting two new ones in my ear cartilage!  I thought that the second would hurt less, since my ear would already be all hot a numb from the first one…not true!  It sooo much hurt more.

this was my left ear at 1:30pm today

this is my ear at 2:00pm

Also I have 3 new years resolutions, and one goal:

1.  Practice Gratitude every day before bed.  Think of three things I am grateful for.

2.  Practice Patience every day.  Remember that not everyone sees the world as I do.  Wait and good things will come to you.

3.  Become a derby rock star! This means a lot of hard work, on and off the track.  I would like to become more agile and increase endurance.  I am pumped for this season and I can’t wait for our first bout in a few weeks!  Watch out, cause here I come!

Last night we drafted five new (and one returning) Dorothys! It was an exciting night! I have been having so much fun working with the fresh meat (and enjoying no longer being fresh meat) and watching them improve and eventually make it into the league. It was a tough year, we had a lot of talented women trying out, but few spots. I am glad that I was not a captain or co-captain this year, as I wouldn’t want to have to make those tough decisions.

So here is to the 2011 season! I can’t wait to get started!

(note: season ticket sets make great gifts! you can get yours at www.kcrollerwarriors.com)

No this is not a post about pregnancy…I have just been 9 months overdue to write a post.  If I were to calculate the fine (at my library) it would be in the ballpark of $400.  Whoops!

However, instead of filling you in on nine months of pretty much only working and playing derby I am going to go back to posting like usual and hope the three people who read this blog don’t notice!

Today I want to tell you about my new favorite thing!  Producteev!  If you know me at all you know I love a good to do list.  There is nothing like crossing something off your list to make you feel accomplished.  For the last several years I have been keeping some pretty awesome lists in a variety of ways.  One of the least effective, and most stressful was keeping it all in a notebook.  While this worked well (especially because I got to physically cross things off and writing them down really ingrained them in my memory) things got left off the list.  And worst of all, if I forgot my notebook or the one time I thought I lost it, I go insane, uncontrollably insane.  Not good.

Then I moved to trying to keep track of things with Outlook’s tasks.  Which worked great, especially when I had a Palm for a phone that could sync all of that stuff, so I always had it with me wherever I went, and I could log into my email from home and see stuff there too.  It also had the advantage of reoccurring tasks so that i wouldn’t forget stuff, and I could schedule things waaaay in the future.  Then I switched to an android phone that couldn’t sync with outlook tasks…oh no!

A friend recommended Remember the Milk to me, and it seemed like a great solution.  It had widgets for my google calendar, could sync with an app on my phone, and I could create reoccurring events.  However, their free version just wasn’t up to the job, items would get permanently deleted when they should have just reoccurred, dates were getting messed up.  I was missing things that I should have been doing (like updating this blog) and I couldn’t see a way out.  I didn’t want to pay the $25 for the better app on my phone (waaaay expensive RTM!).  And then the to do app that I use stopped supporting Remember the Milk.  I could have kept with an old version of the app but I decided it was a good time to migrate.

One service that I want to be able to use (because I love all things they make) is Google Tasks.  It would be perfect if they could just figure out the reoccurring tasks deal, but alas that solution looks long in coming.

Then I stumbled across Producteev.  It is similar to Remember the Milk in that it is a web hosted to do list.  It emails me when I am late on tasks.  I can categorize what I am working on.  If you are a business professional you can pay for an account to share among employees and be able to dole out tasks…(how do I get Ryan on this so I can just add to his to do list from afar?).  It syncs with the app on my phone.  It is practically perfect.

If you need reoccurring tasks to survive, and you can’t use Outlook for some reason, I strongly suggest using Producteev.  My only beef is that they really need to improve their reoccurring task options.  Right now I can set it for a certain date of the month (2nd of the month, etc) or a certain day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc) or after a certain amount of time (2 weeks, 20 days, etc) but I can’t say “1st Monday of the month” or anything more complicated.  This is something that I could do on Remember the Milk that I will miss.  But it was worth the switch.  Go out there and be productive!

P.S. best part is that it saves my completed tasks so that at the end of the month when I have to account for every second of my days at work (don’t ask) I can see what I have completed!

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