Caterina.net

It's unlike me to go for this long without posting, but wow! I've been travelling. Stewart and I went to Sooke Harbour House for Saturday-Monday, and then got on a plane Tuesday and came down here to San Francisco, in whose airport I sit as I write. And I have some blog posts that are sitting and waiting to be finished and posted very soon.

Dooce, of course, by way of Stewart.

Amazon Prime is this thing you can sign up for for $75 and get free shipping for a year. Michael says he'd sign up for it if the shipping discount also applied to items on his Wish list, but of course even without that incentive, I've gone and enlisted.

The only problem is, I still live in Canada, and Amazon Prime doesn't ship free to Canada. My solution to this problem was to have all my stuff shipped to my sister in San Francisco. Now, I have an amazing and tolerant big sister. She let me hang out in her spare bedroom for six months, right after she and Brian had gotten married, when by any rights no sister-in-law should have been hanging around impinging upon what most assuredly would have been marital bliss, contributing neither rent nor housekeeping, nor seeking any remunerative employment.

But I may have managed to find the limits of her patience. It's been two months since I signed up for Amazon Prime, and two months since I've been to her house (though I did get to see her and the new baby for lunch down in the valley last time I was there). I admit I have a problem. A growing Giza of boxes has been accumulating in her house, and Corey says she's investing in cardboard futures.

From zen.

I haven't been stuck in airplanes seeking oxygen. No, the truth is I haven't posted here because I've been trying unsuccessfully during every available non-working hour to break Level 12 on Zuma, with only my repetitive stress injuries to show for it.

Blogging is basically impossible.

(via xvarenah)

The main symptom of this particular illness is that I feel as if my head is going to explode, like a bottle of Odwalla that was left outside in the sun for a week. It's not like any cold or flu I've ever had before, and the interesting thing is I feel like an illustration I saw once in a children's book of a person with an enormous head shaped like an onion or a water tower -- I thought it was from the second Alice in Wonderland book Through the Looking Glass, but haven't been able to find the illustration I'm looking for.

Maybe it's not the weirdest illness ever. That distinction may belong to the Alice In Wonderland Syndrome, in which people see the world and the people in it as being either very very tiny, or themselves as very very tiny and the rest of the world as unbelievably huge.

Thomas Mann, model sibling? No. I came across an old issue of Grand Street (as I was getting rid of four years worth of magazines, mostly New Yorkers that I finally accepted would never be read) and in it were two letters from Mann to his older brother Heinrich, also a novelist, that had been found in a bookstore in Berlin. Just before he proceeded to mercilessly tear Heinrich's most recent novel to shreds, he gloats just a little:

So the elastic band on my Moleskine was always breaking, and I also found that the pages on the regular notebooks were too thin, and the paper on the sketchbooks too thick.

I recently converted to the Cult of Getting Things Done and needed a pocket notebook with different sections, which if you're also a member of the cult, you'll understand. So I found these Noto notebooks made by Ciak, an Italian company, which are the same approximate size as Moleskines, but with 8 sections comprised of different colored pages. It also has a soft flexible cover, which makes it better for pockets than Moleskines, whose covers are hard cardboard. The only thing I miss is the little pocket in the back. More info here.

I first heard of Getting Things Done from 43 Folders, and pretty soon I heard about it everywhere. Having read it, I understand why it has become a cult. Cults make you feel as if you have some secret, some understanding, some special something, that is not available to the uninitiated, and certainly Getting Things Done makes me feel this way. I only finished reading it two days ago, but find myself talking about it all the time, inviting people to come and admire my file cabinet, and pitying the poor lost souls who have not yet found The Way. Because the other thing that cults do to create zealots is solve some hitherto insurmountable problem that causes great anguish, and the problem that GTD solves is the problem of stress.

GTD solves this problem in an interesting and ingenious way, that seems obvious only in retrospect. The reason you are stressed is because you have too much to do. And you can't fall asleep because you feel as if there is something you forgot, or should be doing, or are trying to decide or solve. And when you get to work sometimes you are in a blind panic because you have so much to do you are paralyzed by the sheer volume of it all. And you are worrying about it all because you've got all these projects, things like Develop the Marketing Strategy or Clean Out The Garage or Plan the Trip to France or Land the Johnson Account and you worry about them all the time because none of these projects are actionable. You write them down on your To Do list, but your worrybrain isn't fooled -- none of these things are things you can do. Because, in an example given in the book, you can't Clean Out The Garage because to even get started first you have to get rid of the fridge. How are you going to get rid of the fridge? You have to rent a truck to take it to Goodwill. Or call your cousin David to see if he wants to fridge. So that is the only thing that will calm your worrybrain. Put that on your list: Call David re: fridge. You can actually do that. It's really quite simple and quite amazing. Stress? Adios! So read it. And also read Merlin's guide to getting started with GTD, which is a great summary.

Getting Things Done was written by this fellow David Allen, a complete square, who actually wrote the phrase "when the stuff hits the fan....", a Ned Flanders, like Mr. Lagatutta, my grade school music teacher, who made us sing "I get by with a little help from my friends, I get by with a little help from my friends..." at the school choir performance, when geez, was there anyone who didn't know that the second "by" should have been "high"? I digress, but digression is sometimes where all the fruit and fun is, and no lie.

Just go buy a copy.

"It's so hard! You have to go out in the cold weather, and smile anyway, even when you're standing there in a bikini in January shooting the Cruisewear collections..."

OK I have 5% more sympathy than before, which still doesn't make me sympathetic, only less disdainful of the claim . I was freezing my BUNS off when this was taken. And OK, this isn't Vogue either, it's Business Week. Thanks Heather.

I really need to remember to get that jetlag book that Janice recommended. You look up your time zone and then the time zone of where you are travelling to, and it tells you when to eat and when to sleep. So far my strategy has been to not sleep at all.

I'm in Heathrow, waiting to board a plane to Paris for a conference Loic organized, Les Blogs: Blogs and Social Software, also written upin Wired.

Knowing my thing for small animals, Stewart saved me the slide show of these penguins going through security at Denver Airport. Aw.

We're staying here in St. Germain des Pres, near the Senat, where the conference is taking place. We had a lovely lunch at Le Relais d'Entrecote, which is this restaurant that serves only entrecote and frites with a salad, nothing else. With a special secret green sauce that is rumored to be made with fish. Then a bunch of walking around with David-Michel, a trip to La Hune, a lovely bookstore between those two venerable cafes, Flore and Deux Magot, and some lovely lavender macaroons from Laduree. Raining, unfortunately, but it's still Paris, after all that, you won't hear me complaining!.

Off to the conference now!

One of the most horrible things is to be sick away from home. I was sick in Paris for a couple days -- throwing up sick -- and only recovered enough to fly yesterday to New York, where Stewart and I attended the Copernican Awards dinner, only to come back to the hotel, where Stewart became sick. So now we're staying an extra day here, before flying back to Vancouver, and then flying down to San Francisco again.

But the good things about being sick in hotels are that there's always ginger ale on hand in the middle of the night, and there are as many clean towels as you could possibly ask for.

• The good thing is that if you are in the line for customs and immigration farthest to the left, there are often four officers serving one line. The bad thing is that more and more people seem to be figuring this out.

• The good thing is that I am home. The bad thing is that I am only home for 19 hours.

• The good thing is that when I arrived, the latest copy of Cabinet Magazine had arrived. The other good thing is I have to be on a plane tomorrow, so I have time to read it. There is no bad thing about this particular item.

• The good thing is I have a wonderful little dog. The bad thing is I have been home twice for less than 24 hours and so he is staying with Klaus and Esther. Bad for me, not for him. He loves Klaus and Esther.

• The bad thing is that I am exhausted. The good thing is that this blog post is done and I can go to sleep now.

So everyone who asked me where to get those notebooks I mentioned , I found them at Kate's Paperie in New York. They don't seem to sell them at their online store. There's one location on 57th St around 6th, and another down on Broadway around Spring, if memory serves. The 57th street location only has the ones with the colored paper and lines, and only a very few left, since I went ahead and stocked up with enough to last me a very long time. Don't know what they have in stock downtown.