the procrastinating girl

Blue Tooth-less

Much to my chagrin, I was recently forced to give up my beloved Subaru.  The backseat was too tight, ironic as it was a mid-sized SUV and I only have two children who are widely-acknowledged to be quite small.  But out it went.  In came our new Mazda CX-9 boasting all kinds of new automotive toys.  Now, I am not one of those McLosers who walk around never removing their wireless earpieces, but I do enjoy my car talk time.  So when I heard the Mazda came with Bluetooth, I was twitchy.  No more earbud?  I could just talk into the ether and be heard?  Oh life, how I love thee!  Before driving out of the dealership, the salesman entered in my phone's address book and I was set.  Dial Mom.  And there she was.  How is it we don't yet have a Club Med on Mars?  Because the next morning when I hopped into my car boasting a mileage of five, my address book was gone.  Vanished.  Paging Miss Marple.  So now every time I try and make a call I have a contentious conversation with the lilting voice of the Bluetooth woman who tells me my 'options'.  The truth is I have only one.  Deal with my address book so my car stops calling China instead of Chappaqua.

Photo Finished

The new year is less than two weeks old, but it's already time for a sweeping generalization.  I believe it is out to get me.  Around most corners, there has been what feels like some kind of inexplicable cosmic force slapping me across the cheek.  And I don't do inexplicable cosmic force.  My Sunday was the best example.  With several hours unbelievably to myself, I decided to be efficient.  Right.  I wanted to burn CDs of pictures from the last (mumbled number of) years, then go have prints made and begin assembling albums.  Because, you know, we. don't. have. any.  Upon sitting down in front of my laptop, already totally impressed with myself, I immediately noticed something was quirky with iPhoto.  Things weren't dragging and dropping.  I could drag, but then I couldn't drop.  Then I couldn't export.  Then I could, but I couldn't export enough.  I definitely couldn't burn anything.  But I was about to spontaneously combust.  I called Apple's infamous helpdesk where everyone sounds like they just hopped off a surfboard and picked up the receiver.  The good news is that my pictures are indeed safe.  The bad news is that for now they are safe, but stuck on my laptop.  Although, the more I think about it, I do carry it with me often.  Pictures from our trip to Quebec?  Well, I happen to have them right here!

Name-Dropping

I love watching anything insider-y.  Anything that lets me feel like, even for a second, that I'm in on the joke.  Entourage.  Wag The Dog.  The Player.  And more than life itself, Soapdish.  So I smiled in my Honeycomb the other day when I was presented with an equivalent moment: a TPG topic about TPG.  A few weeks ago, I started getting emails saying my real domain name was about to expire.  And I had to 'act now'.  Well, my brain simply does not respond to two-word commands.  'Renew domain' got lost on the list of priorities somewhere in between 'pack for endless after-school activities' and 'try and find floor of car.'  The day of renewal reckoning passed without my attention.  Then, I got another email.  And if I'm not mistaken, the tone was rather scolding.  I went online immediately while huffing and puffing.  The URL had been available to the general public for over a week.  Had it been taken?  Was there another girl in Colorado who enjoyed basking in the glory of putting things off as I do?  Maryland?  Alaska?  Palin??  Well, a few clicks later and I was saved.  The domain name is mine again for two more years and counting.  And no, I haven't done anything with it yet.

Do I Feel a Draft?

Have you ever looked through the drafts folder of your email program?  I just did.  What a goldmine.  Or, rather, a graveyard.  Very often I use email as a note-taking application and save the text as a draft.   This has been a great way to keep a steady stream of ideas about something like, say, home improvement issues.  Great, assuming you go back and revisit them.  Otherwise, you just end up with seventeen messages titled 'Good Greens'.  Confession: I can go a little paint-crazy.  It's the researcher in me.  Similarly, I have emails complete with fun-filled family vacations for four that we have never and likely will never take.  Save as?  Draft.  But I can be forced to hit 'save' for other reasons.  If the phone rings, I can even be distracted mid-message.  Was that the case with the unfinished email to my daughter's kindergarten teacher about coming in to volunteer?  I hope that got resolved.  She's now in first grade.  Then there are other drafts that defy explanation, the veritable black holes.  The large vacant fields addressed to names like 'Jen'.  These I have simply deleted from my hard drive.  Something tells me 'Jen' and I have already caught up. 

I, Photo

Yesterday I uploaded about 25 truly underwhelming photographs from my reunion.  Once the transfer was complete, my eye caught the grand total of my digital library.  Want to guess?  4,883.  Want to know how many of those exist in real-world photo albums?  Zero.  I am not kidding.  I've had a few individual pictures developed.  I've even purchased the occasional album with lovely toile fabric or mod geometric print.  Beyond that, the process has been stalled indefinitely since the first time I pressed "import" on iPhoto. This is me sabotaging myself yet again, because I am totally sentimental.  For years, I have kept all my letters and cards in the same light wood cigar box.  And still have old mix tapes, even though I have nothing on which to play them (saving my neighbors from an afternoon interlude of Journey, The Commodores and Howard Jones).  I would love to have a visual record of my life that was accessible and orderly.  Maybe tomorrow I will unearth my empty albums instead of going to kickboxing, even though last week superscary Herman told me "Good job today" (or was that "Get out of the way?").  It feels a little late in the library to start such a project, but the timing may actually be right.  I just spent the weekend looking back.  And I'm still really in the mood.  

Radio Free Bedford

It's a myth that we procrastinators put off only those tasks that don't matter to us.  When I got my new deep bronze (NOT brown) Subaru Tribeca last summer, I was very excited that it included a free three-month trial subscription of XM radio.  I'm a little ADD when it comes to channel changing and this brought my listening options to a whole new level.  My passengers didn't exactly match my enthusiasm.  But, come on, an entire station devoted to retro 80's pop on channel 8?  The top 20 hits on 20?  I was addicted immediately.  I also knew that I needed to call with my credit card info or eventually my service would be turned off.  It wasn't expensive, it was just something I needed to do.  The weeks ticked by.  Then that fateful morning came when I turned my key in the ignition and... crickets.  No classic rock on 49 or acoustic rock on 50.  Nothing.  That was seven long months ago.  Then, in today's mail, I got a special promotion saying that my beloved XM is being turned back on!  I am getting three weeks for free and can join now at a discounted rate.   I certainly appreciate second chances.  Almost as much as show tunes on 28.

The Wisdom of the Genius Bar

After 44 years at IBM, my dad finally hung it up last Halloween.  I guess he wanted to try out the identity 'retired guy'.  Forever.  Big Blue paid for my education, my tennis lessons, my life.  Naturally, I paid it back by being a steadfast Apple customer.  My most recent acquisition, a new MacBook, came last week.  Oh, it's something.  But when I first fired it up, I noticed the delete button wasn't working right.  As anyone with an expensive new piece of hardware with a rapidly expiring warranty would do, I tried to ignore it.  Each morning, I would surf around and, to my horror, realize it hadn't self-corrected overnight.  Of course, I needed to face the truth.  The key was broken.  And I needed to deal with it immediately.  Ugh.  So on a cloudy, rain-soaked Friday afternoon, I brought my troubled new toy to its luminescent mothership, the Apple Store.   At the Genius Bar (their way cool help desk), my new BFF Seth not only agreed that the button was defective, he gave me a brand new machine and transferred all my data on the spot.  What a rush.  And if I had waited one more day, the warranty would have ended and I would have been left with a bum delete key.  Although I think I'd still rather have typos than a PC.  Sorry pop.

The Culprit

So it is a bit of a cliche that I launched a blog about my inability to complete simple tasks and then proceeded to abandon it for several days. BUT unlike most other cases of performance anxiety, this time it wasn't completely my fault. Just after I went live with TPG, my router fried and I lost Web access. For me, this is the equivalent of being sent to Biosphere 2 (minus the fascinating ecological research). Good times. Thankfully, I am back up and running thanks to my new best friend, the Actiontec MI424WR, which I'm sure will last as long as its predecessor... until the week after its warranty expires.

Look, I have a blog

Ok, so it's not the parting of the Red Sea... But since my blog is based on this life-long personality flaw, it's kind of a miracle that I exercised my limited follow-through skills to get it up and running. So here it is, or rather, will be, a chronicle of what I don't do... for no good reason other than my own inertia. I'm hoping maybe the public humiliation will force me into a new, more organized state of being. People say blogging is powerful. Can it undo 36 years of saving everything until the very last minute? We shall see...