Sherri Cornelius

It's a busy week, with Christmas programs and school parties. Maggie's cast comes off today. With drive time that will probably be a 4-hr event, so I might not have time to comment on blogs.

Speaking of Maggie's cast, since blogging about it I've gotten a lot of hits from the search term "her cast". It seems a strange term to search on to me, not specific enough to find anything relevant, unless they are looking for the cast of a show called Her, so I did a little digging. When I searched on it, though, all I got were articles which used it the same way I did. The searches have been scattered across the world and through different search engines, so it's perplexing.

Anyhoo...

I got a Wii Fit Plus so I'll have some kind of physical activity over the winter. I have a treadmill, but it doesn't seem to have much of an impact on my overall health. Plus it's boring as hell. I have Wii Sports as well, but it's a couple of years old, and also boring. So that's where the Wii Fit Plus comes in. New games, a virtual exercise coach, that cool balance board...Right now my concern is keeping myself from melting into the couch, but I'm sure I'll graduate to something more strenuous later. I saw something about Jillian Michaels having a training game for the balance board, and she's tough.

Seems like there was something else to talk about but I can't remember, and I'm out of time, besides. Hope you have a great day.

Had a little excitement before dinner yesterday when my five-year-old daughter fell into the neighbor's pond. She's fine, was in there only a few seconds before pulling herself out, but I'm still a bit traumatized. Hopefully she and the other kids are too, just enough to make them more aware. I might tell this story in full later, or maybe not. Like I said, I'm traumatized.

Other than that, life has been pretty mundane. I've been walking a couple of miles every day while the weather's nice. The van is still down and the hubs seems to be in no hurry to work on it. I am! It'll be nice this weekend, so maybe we can get it running then.

I had a terrible time staying focused on work yesterday. It was turning into one of those days where I just float around and, at the end, wonder what I had done all day, so I decided to nip that in the bud. After a little research I found a couple of online time management tools, the best of which is Work Timer Online.

The Work Timer is going to be very useful for seeing where my time goes. The work I'm doing for others always seems to get done first to my WIP's detriment, so by keeping a log of how much time I've spent on each project I can balance it better. The only problem is my spotty wi-fi connection. If the connection goes down before I've archived my time, it's possible to lose that time. Not a huge problem, since it's not like it's billable hours I'm losing.

I also tried a web-based countdown timer. One reason I have trouble concentrating is because I have this irrational fear of losing track of time. It helped to set the timer and say, "I'm going to do this for 15 minutes, and there's no way I can lose track of time because the timer will buzz me." I kept thinking about the timer so I couldn't completely lose myself in my work, but it was a LOT better, and I feel it will only get better with time. I didn't care for the web-based timer I used, so I'll probably just stick with Spacejock's yTimer, which I've used for years for the kids' Internet time.

I used to let organizing the activities get in the way of the activities. What organizational tools have you found to be most helpful?

Yep, I'm back on the treadmill. I stopped walking when I hurt my hand and my old laptop broke for good at the same time. I just want to take a moment to remind you that Thoughts From the Treadmill is never edited for typos or anything else dumb. It's just me typing and praying I don't say anything that can be used against me later.

So my mom sold me this laptop, and I finally got around to fixing up the treadmill to accommodate it. It's bigger all the way around, and the base where you rest your hands is a great expanse. My treadmill is a manual variety, so I have to push against this bar, but my hands kept slipping with the counter-pressure. I'm trying out some of those non-skid pads I use in my utensil drawer to keep the divider from sliding around. It works okay, but I think by the time I'm done the heels of my hands may be sore.

So I'm thinking about Twitter. Is it wrong to follow thousands of people? How can a person possibly keep up with all those tweets? Obviously, they can't. They're using a program like Tweetdeck to keep track of the people they REALLY care about, and what are the rest? I don't personally think it's wrong, but I wouldn't want to follow that many people. I assume these followers are doing it for the networking possibilities, and that's fine. I use Tweetdeck, too, filtering out the folks I want to keep in touch with but who tweet too much for me to keep up with. Also, if I follow someone who is also my friend on Facebook, I prefer to just interact that way. Do you do that, too? Is there anyone on Twitter that you love to death, but who just tweets too much? Do you feel guilty about filtering that person? I did at first, but not anymore. I've decided what place each social networking service has in my life. It's nothing personal, I'm still keeping up with everyone I care about, just in my own way.

Feeling a bit faint...may be a good time to stop...