A year ago I made a few resolutions for 2016. You can read the whole thing in January 2016 as well as my follow-up in April, but suffice it to say I didn’t do a very good job of sticking to them. Briefly, they were to continue the purge of unnecessary things from my house, learn to play the piano and guitar, and finally to write more. I don’t feel like I was overly successful with any of these, especially the musical ones. We continue to remove things from our home, but increasingly there are disagreements about what we can get rid of. I haven’t touched the piano but one of the Christmas presents I received was a computer program called Rocksmith to connect my electric guitar to my computer. It’s been a lot of fun so far. There are lessons, games, and songs to play along with and the computer gives instant feedback as to how you’re doing. I’m expecting the kids to want a guitar soon so that they can play the games too. As far as writing more, I definitely have been doing that. I find myself more often having conversations with friends about their own decluttering endeavors and feel like I’m making an impact on at least a few people. Am I making new resolutions for 2017 then?Yes and no.The more I read about resolutions, the more I feel like I’m just setting myself up to feel guilty about no following through on something. I guess you could say I’m keeping my old resolutions to continue decluttering, write more, and learn some guitar but what I think we all really want is to just be better and happier people than we were last year. I think I have a good idea of my faults. I’m probably unaware of some and my wife could likely add to the list if she wasn’t so nice. I know I’m impatient, probably not as thankful as I should be for things I have, and I constantly badger my family about having too much stuff laying around the house that they never seem to put away. I have searched around the internet for ideas and one list of resolutions resonated with me from CatholicStewardship.com. I’m going to adopt part their list of resolutions for this year.
Ask the Lord for guidance, strength and perseverance in achieving your resolutions. In his letter to the Phillipians, Saint Paul writes: "I can do everything through Him who gives me strength" (Phil 4:13). If God is the center of our New Year's resolutions, they have a better chance for success. Thanks for reading. Wish me luck and if you would like to see the full list of resolution ideas on CatholicStewardship.com you can check them out here. Are you saving something (clothes, a bottle of wine, some fancy dishes, etc.) for a special occasion? Has that occasion ever come? How many special occasions have you had? What really is a special occasion? I think most of us do not even know what a real special occasion is, or at least we don’t realize it until it’s already happened. Oxford dictionary defines a special occasion as “A particularly noteworthy event, ceremony, social gathering, or celebration“. That covers a lot. This year is the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th. That sounds like a special occasion to me being a particularly noteworthy event. I don’t think special occasions are necessarily always happy occasions. Last month, I visited my dad and for at least a few hours, I was in the same house with my dad and my six sisters. It was quite a social gathering and celebration. Definitely a special occasion. Depending on your religion, there are some dates most people would consider a special occasion like Easter and Christmas. Similarly, depending on where you live days such as the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving would be considered special occasions. Those are obvious ones that many people would come up with if you asked them what their idea of a special occasion was. Maybe we can come up with some more obscure ones though. What about the day you finish paying off your student loans? They day you pay off that first car or sign the papers to buy your first house? How about the last time you and your spouse sat down for dinner with all of your kids at once? We recently sat all three kids down and watched the movie A Christmas Story with them. They loved it and it was undoubtedly a special occasion. Here’s my definition of a special occasion: Any time we are alive and experiencing something that we can appreciate, celebrate, or commemorate. If that experience happens with someone you love, then it’s even more special but we should be able to find something special about every day of our lives. Then we should celebrate that by enjoying every day somehow because the next one is never a guarantee. So, eat off the China and break out the crystal wine glasses because won’t it be a shame if you just stare at those things every day waiting for just the right special occasion to use them and it never comes? It’s only stuff, right?I have a very special pilsner glass that was given to me when I became godfather for our friends’ daughter. I love it. It has my name and proudly proclaims that I am her godfather. I would probably be heartbroken if it broke, but at the same time it’s just a glass and I refuse to think that it’s just for displaying on the shelf, never to be enjoyed. I use it all the time. If I die with a bottle of unopened expensive Scotch in my basement, I will consider myself a failure at enjoying life. I want to try it all and learn to appreciate every minute of it. Don’t keep your favorite shirt in the closet because you don’t want to get it dirty. Don’t leave that bottle of Pappy Van Winkle sitting around because you’re waiting for that perfect time to enjoy it. Those days may never come and it doesn’t matter if they do. Any day that we wake up on the right side of the ground with our mind and body intact can be the best day ever. We just have to learn to appreciate those little occasions and make them special.
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I’m excited to announce that I’m now a member of a new affiliate program for Cozi, the family organizing app and website! I’ve been waiting to join this one for a while because Cozi has helped keep my family on time (or at least as close to on time as my family is capable of) for all of the appointments, games, activities, and more for a few years now. We really would be lost without it. This post is going to sound like a commercial, but I can’t tell you how much we rely on this. Between my wife and I working and three kids all involved in activities, then throw in any appointments for the doctor, dentist, haircuts, birthday parties, church, etc. and Cozi has been a lifesaver for us. Unfortunately, we used to miss appointments on occasion, or suddenly remember them at the last minute so that we had to scramble to get there. At one time, I was pretty sure the lady who cuts my wife and the kids’ hair was going to ban us because we missed so many appointments. That’s where the the scheduling feature of Cozi comes in. Assign everyone a color and you can easily see on the calendar which family member each appointment applies to. Then let Cozi email your calendar to you every week. Cozi also has a shopping list feature, a journal, to-do lists, and recipes. There is an app available for Android and Apple as well as a website where you can manage everything. Here’s how we use the shopping lists. We have lists for Groceries, Target (which we’re using less lately because we try to buy fewer things and because we shop online more), Hardware (because I can never remember things like what size furnace filter I need), and Online (which has turned into more of a wishlist). Did I mention that the shopping lists update immediately? One of my favorite things to do if I know my wife is out shopping, is to start adding random things to the list. She never falls for it though. She’s too smart for me. Then there’s the To-Do lists which I’ll admit we don’t really use for their intended purpose. Mine currently has only one item “Call those bastards at the cable company”. Instead, we have things like a list of local thrift stores and their hours, a list of things we wish we would have brought camping this past summer, and the keyless entry codes for our cars. The best part about Cozi is that it’s free as long as you don’t mind some advertisements. If you don’t like ads or you really need some of the premium features you can pay an annual fee. We’ve gotten by with the free version for quite a while now though. Are you sold yet?One final note and I’ll shut up. Cozi, like any other organizer, is only useful if you take the time to set it up and actually use it. One of the things we did was to hang a simple one-week dry-erase calendar in our kitchen. Every Sunday afternoon, my wife looks at Cozi and updates the entire week using different color markers. This allows everyone to see the calendar so that the kids can help keep us on track too. OK. Thanks for reading. Now go sign up for Cozi and let me know how you like it. WHEN I GET AROUND TO IT, I NEED TO (insert mundane task that you’ve been putting off here)Well, here’s your round tuit!It’s time to face it. You will never “find more time”. We all have the same 24 hours every day. Stop wasting your time looking for extra time and use what you have more productively. There is no extra. OK, if you want to get technical, most days are just slightly longer than 24 hours. According to TimeAndDate.com, today for example, is 24 hours and 1.17 milliseconds long. Hey, look! I found more time today. Now, I have to decide what to do with my extra 1.17 ms. Anyway, here’s a couple of great time-saving tips for you.
Seeing a pattern here?Far more often than I’d like to admit, I catch myself scrolling mindlessly through Facebook or Twitter reading pointless nonsense about what someone that I haven’t seen in 20 years had for dinner that day. Eventually, I snap out of my daze and realize I should be getting some needed sleep or actually having a face-to-face conversation with someone. The worst is when I realize I’m staring at my phone while my wife or one of my kids is trying to talk to me. Then I feel terrible when I realize I haven’t been listening to anything they’ve said. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy social media to keep up with friends and family all over the country. Since we don’t live near any family, we put pictures of my kids up for both sides of the family to see on Facebook. It’s also about the only way that I could keep in touch with all of my friends from the Army scattered all over the world. Not to mention the Facebook garage sale groups where we’ve unloaded a bunch of things. There’s a time and place though and you need to find a good balance. Time management experts (I’m not one), recommend setting aside time specifically for things like checking email and social media. Decide how much time you need and stick to it. Another recommendation is to not even have apps like Facebook and Twitter installed on your phone. This will force you to at least sit down intentionally in front of a computer when you want to spend time on them. I hope you haven’t found reading this a waste of your time. If you’re looking for more time management tips check out the links below. For the last several years, I enjoyed a fairly easy commute to work each day. A straight 14 mile shot up the expressway and only a few blocks on city streets at each end, the trip usually took about 20 minutes, 30 on a bad day. Then, last fall my company announced a consolidation of offices and a few months later I found myself driving 50 miles in traffic each way to work. I hate the drive. It takes anywhere from 50 minutes to 2 hours. There is always traffic, construction, insane drivers, and people sitting in the driver’s seat who appear to be doing everything except actually driving. Not to mention the disruption to my family life. There are days that I feel like I barely see my kids because I leave the house before anyone else is out of bed. Evenings seem to be a mad rush consisting of dinner, sports, music lessons, and then getting everyone to bed so that I can go to bed early enough to not be a zombie at 5:30 am. One of my challenges is leaving at just the right time to pick up my kids and get them to a scheduled activity like piano lessons. We may end up being 15 minutes early or 15 minutes late depending on how long it takes me to get to their daycare. The image at the top of this article is an actual screen capture from Google Maps taken recently about the time I wanted to head home from work. The image doesn’t even cover my entire commute. Needless to say it took me a while to get home that day. Instead, I wish my commute looked more like this drawing my oldest did when he was 10. The irony is that I’m pretty sure he drew this in the car on one of our long trips to visit family. Putting 500-plus miles a week on my car I now find I have at least 10 hours a week behind the wheel that I’ve been trying to make the best of, rather than just listening to music. Here I would like to offer up some tips on how I’ve been surviving my commute. I try to take advantage of the technology available since I have a relatively new car with things like USB inputs, Bluetooth, etc. as well as a smartphone. I could live without most of the gadgetry on the car, but I have to have my smartphone. First, a few things to have on hand that make life easier:
Next, suggestions on what to listen to:
All of these things help me maintain my sanity most of the time, but the biggest piece of advice I could give to anyone would be to just try remaining calm behind the wheel and always pay attention to the road. I’m not always good at staying calm but I’m getting better and the things above help me to feel like I’m at least making all that time in the car somewhat productive. I also make a point to not let these things be a distraction. If I find myself getting lost in an audio book or podcast, I just pause it for a few minutes. Hopefully, someone else can make some use of these suggestions to make their drive more bearable. Let’s all work to cut down on the road rage. Read some articles from the American Safety Council about road rage and defensive driving at SafeMotorist.com. Thanks as always for visiting my site. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my weekly-ish email summary of my latest posts. |
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