How many hours?

Will it take to finish this?



Sheesh. I should be ashamed of myself. In fact, I am. Wow. This is about 6 months worth of magazines and catalogs. And probably one or two of the stacks are older magazines I think I moved over here when cleaning up the spare bedroom for when Jeff and Andrea visited in July. I am plowing through Stack #1 (shortest one, front far left). That was as high as the others at the start of this week.

Bad weather has helped keep me inside and working on it. Slow and steady progress. I need to speed it up, though!

Also, I've successfully cleaned out/up the tall storage shelves in the office. There is still a lot of stuff - binders, materials, things to look at closer, but all 6 of the drawers are empty. Or almost empty. I've thrown a few things back in them to get them out of the way, but nothing major.

Have thrown out at least 4 trash bags of stuff this week - woohoo!! Wonder how many pounds that is? They were heavy, that's all I know.

Onward.

Week of Disasters

Ok, first of all, I should be ashamed of myself. I was using an external HD more than I should have been - i.e., as a working drive and not backup storage as it should have been. It started acting wonky a few weeks ago, and did I leap up and back up all the files (all 300G+ of them?) NO. I did not.

So you know what happened next - actually, let me digress for a moment.

I decided on Sunday that I needed to shake things up a bit. Recalling back to the days when I used to clean and change my bedroom around all the time, and how cool and new everything felt, and how creative and inspired I felt after I did it. Now I know it's moving around the "chi" that causes that feeling!

Anyway, so I'm working on a few things Sunday morning, drive is working fine. I shut down my PC to start Operation Clean Office. 8 hours later I plug my PC back in, plug the HD into the USB drive, and....nothing. I can clearly hear the disk isn't powering up. Just a few faint clicks. And then my panic attack begins. Along with the worst case of self-loathing imaginable. I am smarter than this. I am more tech-savvy than this. I just plain KNOW BETTER. And yet...all is lost.

Or not. I have solicited the (very costly) services of a data recovery facility. Shipped the HD off yesterday and am tracking it via UPS like it's my own child. I am sick. And sad. And miserable. I feel like a limb has been amputated. Every digital photo I've ever taken is on that drive. Every file, every scan, every work product. See what I mean about how stupid I was?

I don't care the cost, I am just hoping, praying, pleading that this data recovery process will work. The HD has been delivered - now I wait for the prognosis from the engineer. As HD failures go, this one wasn't awful. No horrid noises (i.e. the sounds of the disks being destroyed) or anything. Mr. RedFish thinks it's mechanical failure (i.e. the read/write head) rather than sector/disk damage. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE.

It's been a rough few weeks for odd things like this. First, our Garmin GPS unit stopped working while we were in PA for Thanksgiving. It was fine one minute, then we picked up my brother and his gf, and got back in the car, and nothing. Luckily, it was still under warranty, so we sent it back to be repaired.

Then my external HD. Oh, before that, my iPhone froze up and I had to restore it back to factory settings, which wiped out all my saved voicemails and pictures. It wasn't catastrophic like the HD collapse, but it was annoying.

I'm getting to the point where I don't want to touch anything electronic!

BUT..in what I am reading as omens of changing fortunes, good things started happening yesterday after the data recovery people got back to me so quickly (within an hour of my SOS call). The new Garmin arrived via UPS. They replaced our old one instead of repairing it. Then, I opened a program on my PC and found a cached version of one of the lost files. A major one, too. So that made me feel good...at least I have one.

So the upshot of the office rearranging is that I emptied out some drawers, gathered almost two boxfuls of stuff to get rid of, am on the way to finding more. The downside is the spare bedroom is a mess again, because I had to move stuff somewhere. I also miss my old behemoth of a desk more than I realized I would. But it's just an adjustment period, I guess. Less space is frustrating to me right now, but the point is to downsize. I shouldn't need a ton of crap on my desk to work....minimalize! (Is that even a word?).

I also found another foot-high stack of ripped magazine pages in the bottom drawer of one of my storage units. I thought it was all recipes/food, but turns out it isn't. Which is good in one way, because I can get rid of it. Bad, in another, because now I have to go through it! The fun never ends.....lucky for me, just a little work to do now and snow on the way. With my tight budget (what Christmas shopping?) and the cold weather, I have no excuse for not cranking this stuff out. If only I were writing or doing something that would make me money...

I just really want my files back from that hard drive. Then I can get back on track (with backups securely in place)

Minor Update

Not a lot of progress to report, what with finishing up "real" work and Thanksgiving in there. But I'm plugging away on the whole magazine piles. This will keep me busy well into 2008, but I have a good system going and hope to move as quickly as possible!

And we're off...

An end and a beginning!

Tonight, just completed all the previously mentioned piles.

I am beginning work on the stacks of magazines. WOO HOO!

Done!

Let's recap, shall we?

Done!:
2 large crates in closet
all loose pages stored in armoire (1 box, 1 overflow pile, 1 wooden crate)
almost all of 2 crates full of "unprocesed" pages from tv stand in office
1 broken and in need of help crate from office stack
original piles sitting on desk when this project started.

That's a lot since July!

I am just about done with the aforementioned unprocessed pages that were in the crates that form my office tv stand. I am not sure why I decided to do these when they were "hidden" by the cover, but I knew they were there, and by moving them out, I accomplished two things: all the loose piles are accounted for, and I created some new storage space for things off my desk. Will deal with all that later.

In looking around my space this morning - office, spare room/future office, I can see where I'm going. The decluttering is a HUGE project. I realized there is a large storage bin in the spare room full of loose pages. Not sure if they are sorted or what. But I am sticking to my rule of leaving things alone if they are contained right now. And in the other room. Now that I've reached this point, it's time to tackle the next most visible thing - the towering stacks of whole magazines.

I plan to try and process these as I go along - scanning, etc. rather than forming huge piles. Hopefully I can find a lot of it online and/or can be extremely judicious in tossing. As I am realizing, things are cyclical. Everything comes back around again. If only I could just toss the whole lot and call it a day! My OCD will not allow it though. How could I toss all that delicious treasure!

At least I ENJOY this!

Categories, Fun, and Progress

Another month without an update has gone by! But that doesn't mean no progress. Despite taking a week-long vacation earlier this month, I am nearly through all of the "loose" pages I started working on this summer.

The box, piles from the armoire, and the closet, are done. I want to say "gone", but with my sorting system, it's not really gone. A LOT did go into the circular file, at least.

My ultimate goal, at the end of all this, is to have at least what I'm still working through or on, to be separated and organized, rather than piles here, piles there, no organization.

My system is this:

1. To Scan-pages I want to scan/keep for any reason. Right now, there is just one not-quite-full crate of these. My plan once I start on the intact magazines is to scan as I go along with those - don't want to risk getting a crapload of NEW piles sitting around! So this crate may be the very last one I scan. Probably in 2011.

2. To Read-things I am interested in reading, but don't feel the need to scan/keep afterwards. I intend to always carry a file of this and keep another file for before-sleep reading as well. The least important stuff also - could be tossed if absolutely necessary.

3. To Keep (Pictures)- ads, graphics, visual things I want to keep, but not scan

4. To Keep (Reference)- things like tear-out guides, posters, things meant to "tear and save". May scan at some point, may not.

5. Two-Sided/Lists - pages that have info on both sides -- I'm just not dealing with typing/copying/cutting right now. They go in this file to be dealt with later. Lists, that I might want to type up or review, also in this pile.

6. Food/Recipes- self-explanatory. Will be gone through, sorted, scanned, categorized separately

So, where I stand right now:

1. Finishing last of wooden crate pulled from armoire. This will be done in the next day or so.
2. Will do two wooden crates in office (where tv is sitting). I believe this is "raw" piles that I tore out last winter or summer, and when I decided I needed to get these No Scan piles taken care of, I swapped out No Scans for these.
3. I was going to leave the above along, since they are stored and hidden, but then realized they are the last piles in the office. There may be some loose pages in crates over in the spare room, but one thing at a time.
4. After that's done, I start on the intact magazines. Most recent first - that working backward thing is the best trick I ever read for "catching up" on anything. I originally read it in relation to scrapbooking photographs - you should start with your most recent, or else you will NEVER catch up. Makes total sense, it's so obvious. Yet many people start from the oldest and try to go forward. Does not work with anything you continue to add on to.

It doesn't look like it sometimes, but progress is happening!

Slow and steady...

I can't believe no update since 8/30. Where did September go? I've been moderately but steadily busy with work, but have continued to plug away at the loose stacks mentioned in previous posts. I recently did a mini-cleanup and am down to one crate and the original box brought over from the armoire.

Gone are the two crates from the closet (and I was right, so much of that stuff was old, outdated, or irrelevant - hello, wedding planning information?!). I haven't measured lately, but I've moved quite a lot of recycle bags outside.

I realized not too long ago that the two crates currently serving as my office tv stand ALSO have stacks of loose magazine pages stuffed in them. I seem to remember these are "raw" piles - the crates once had "No Scan" stacks in them, but I remember swapping out the no scan piles a while ago -- maybe even before I really started focusing on this project -- because I realized that my No Scan piles were getting way out of hand. So I put the raw (unsorted and unprocessed) piles in the crates and did the No Scans. Who knows when...earlier this year I guess.

I haven't done much scanning - all year really. My last major push was last fall. So that's why I assume the switch over to getting through the stuff I didn't plan to scan happened after the holidays last year. The couple of times I've tried to catch up on some scanning my software has crashed, taking all the temp files with it, and it pissed me off so I didn't start again!

Overall, making progress. Maybe not as much as I'd like, but as FlyLady says, "Progress, not Perfection". I am getting there. And having fun along the way. My system is solid and consistent and I am making a dent in the piles.

What I need to focus on next is the ever-growing stacks of intact magazines on my office credenza. Yowza. Way out of hand. I really want to hit the end of the calendar year with at least the "catch up point" in sight. Busy busy busy!