I had such big intentions for Friday morning after wasting the entire day on Thursday. And then I slept in. Only by an hour, but I still had all of Thursday’s jobs to do as well as Friday’s jobs, and we had an early finish as Monkey Dust had a Friday night gig.
Friday night gigs are usually quite rare, as every member in the band has a regular day job. But for some reason the person responsible for booking gigs this year (not me!) has managed to book in a load of Friday night gigs. Lately I don’t even finish work myself until gone 6pm, but when we have a weekday gig, we have to be eating tea at 6pm, which means I have to be ready before tea.
So Friday was already a stunted day. And already a packed day. Without adding in Thursday’s jobs as well and then sleeping in.
I had my dirty cuppa, caught up on social media, changed my profile pictures back, hung out a washload, and fed the birds. I didn’t put another washload through as that would mean hanging it out on a Saturday, and I’m trying to free up the weekends now the summer months are approaching so we can go out or do work in the garden.
We’re alternating weekends going out and weekends doing something in the garden. This week should have been a weekend in the garden, but the poet had already cut the grass once last week and he planned on lowering the blades and cutting it again on Friday, in between work and the gig.
First job when I eventually landed at my desk was Friday’s blog post. I hadn’t done it on Thursday and it was a long one.
I updated the 12-project spreadsheet, but I was already at 12 projects and I’m also revising the Whitehorse Farm story. So that meant I had a new quandary of how to add projects to my planner when I’d run out of room. I could just duplicate it and start again in May, but that didn’t allow for this extra job in April, and it will be an extra job every month as I revise an earlier story or novella.
At first I resisted looking at ways to add it in, but in the end, I just couldn’t help myself. Heck, I was already a day behind. May as well make it a doozy!
I downloaded a few spreadsheets to see if I could get those to work in my existing spreadsheet, but they didn’t really contain the data sets or fields I needed. Or there were way too many of them. So I went and asked the poet to stop what he was doing so we could talk it through. It was as we were talking it through that the solution hit me.
I made a ‘grand totals’ page, then I made the existing ‘writing and revision totals’ page a subtotals page, with one table looking at January to April and another looking at May onwards, and so on. Then I made the grand totals page look at specific month totals. I was happy with the interim result. I still need to make the graphs work, but at least I can keep an eye on my yearly totals at a glance.
My next problem, though, was what was I going to do with this extra April project when the next available set of figures were for May. Not sure how to resolve that one, I decided to set it to percolate over the weekend.
I returned to the large-capacity bird feeders I was looking at for most of Thursday. I narrowed them all down to a shortlist to include 6-port tube feeders, large capacity ground hoppers, a small nijer/niger feeder, and some water drinker hopper things.
Because we like to attract the ground feeders to the garden, we have different food for those birds, and that feed needs bigger holes or the feeder gets all bunged up. So I looked at chicken feeders too. I ended up ordering 2 x 6-port tube feeders, 1 small nijer/niger feeder, 2 x 3kg chicken feeders, and 1 x 6litre chicken waterer. We have one water drinker and 2 baths. This means we’ll now have 2 water drinkers.
Phew!
I had to go and bring in the washing then, and put it away, and then get ready to go out. So I had to pause proceedings for Friday with absolutely nothing done again. It’s a good job I’m flexible and can work at the weekend if I need to. Meanwhile, the poet did indeed make his second grass cut of the week. So that’s 2 x 4 lawns he cut last week.
We decided against tea before the gig, as we hadn’t long had dinner, choosing instead to order a pizza from the takeaway next door to the pub.
The band had a great night. It’s what was once their local and where they pretty much started the band about 25 years ago (they’d all been in bands before then too but this is *this* band). And I found out that at least one person in the audience there reads this blog. So, “Hello!” to the scuba-diving cyclist! (If you’re still reading this far down…)
Weekend catchup tomorrow!
Whew! Lots of detail work in there for you.
So glad the band had a great gig.
It’s all making me go cross-eyed! I think it’s sorted now, though.