Thursday, January 2, 2014

If my dreams have anything to say about it …

my knitting intention will be cleaning out my knitting magazines. I ripped out or copied patterns in my sleep all. night. long.

I'm not sure which method I'll choose. Ripping out means discarding the remaining periodical, because I wouldn't feel right donating it if it wasn't complete. (Although there is a local group that might be willing to take them.) Copying favorite or potential patterns is a lot more work, and uses toner (if I use our copy machine) or ink (if I use the printer).

I'm leaning toward ripping.

I've been collecting knitting magazines for years and years – Interweave Knits, Knitters and Vogue Knitting are the big three, plus many, many, many other single issues that I haven't subscribed to but thought I couldn't live without. So many patterns are now available digitally; I store them all in Dropbox. Much better to have them in the cloud and instantly available, I think, than taking up all that physical shelf space.

With Dropbox, I also can organize them – folders for pullovers, cardigans, toys, household items, for instance – so whenever I want or need to knit a particular project, I can browse easily.

As for the gardening intention … I'm cutting the size of the vegetable garden in half, and will be growing tomatoes, green beans, onions, cucumbers, okra, peppers and squash. Those are the things we eat most; there's no need to grow anything else. I'll be cleaning up the herb bed, which is a disaster but at least it's not a large space to deal with, and this is the year I work on the perennial beds lining the driveway.

I'm in much better physical shape to tackle all these projects this year, and I don't have to do it all at once. I hope an hour a day, beginning in April, will have all areas done by the end of June. If not … well, I can always extend the arbitrary deadline on gardening.

I forgot to include in yesterday's list that I'm journaling my food again. I've been tracking exercise all along – it's so easy with MapMyRun. Tracking food isn't hard, it's just remembering to do it, either when I plan my meals for the day or after I eat. (I use LoseIt! for food journaling.)

Speaking of running, I did a little bit yesterday. The middle portion of a 10K walk was 30 minutes of 1/1 intervals. I'm much slower than I was last time I did this, but that's okay. It felt great to begin a new year by picking up the pace.

Other than a bit of a cold, I'm feeing well and confident and happy and inspired to make 2014 even better than 2013 was.

5 comments:

denise said...

What about a combination rip/scan on patterns? If you have scan capability on your printer or have a separate scanner, then you could get them into Dropbox. Or photographing them would work, but I imagine that would be difficult to do with a good result. Certainly I don't have a camera that's up to that task.

Either way, it will be a time consuming task. But always feels SO GOOD when it's done. I'm an organizational junkie, but never seem to keep ahead of things like this. Always looking for "systems" to organize, but then don't really utilize them like I should. Oh well, maybe this year!

Congratulations on meeting (and exceeding) your goals for 2013. Onward and upward for 2014!

Debbi said...

My scanner/printer isn't capable of sending things directly to Dropbox. Wouldn't that be great? I think it needs to be wired to the router and I'm not willing to do that. I have about half a dozen binders for printed patterns. Hoping that will be enough! Thanks for the idea, though, and the continued support and encouragement.

denise said...

My scanner can't send directly to Dropbox, but to my computer and then I can copy to Dropbox. But in any case, it would be a tedious process, and the binders will serve you well I'm sure.

I did recipe binders several years ago by category and I love them. They've been real lifesavers for quick reference to favorite recipes. I also started saving a lot of things electronically, but then I haven't sorted them into any order, so it's always a search and then print when I want to make something (I hate having the computer in the kitchen while I'm cooking, so I always want a printed copy).

In any case, no matter how you do it, I know it will feel good when it's done!

denise said...

BTW - it was interesting to see Jonathan's comment a day or so ago about not being able to comment here. I still can't do it from Safari - have to go into Chrome. I keep meaning to look into that, but it's interesting that someone else is having issues. I wonder if he uses Safari as well...

Winnie said...

We are supposed to get a blizzard here tonight into tomorrow. I hope you have better weather so you can do your running in safety. Your garden plan sounds great. I do the peppers and tomatoes as I eat them and it is great having fresh tomato sauce in the dead of winter. Hope you get your patterns all ready in the new year. I was gifted some very old sewing patterns for my crafting (someone saw me making flowers with them!)

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