Melva Gifford

I have to admit that I have not completed my perfect garden notebook. Even in its limited use I see the advantages to keeping some type of journal of planting activity outside my house for my yard and garden. Today’s blog has two objectives. One to document what I really want to accomplish in a full fledge garden note book and second to share my brainstorming session with fellow gardeners. I find such a notebook useful in that it helps me remember all the details from year to year that I would otherwise forget. I advise an electronic copy and a hard copy as a backup in case one or the other gets lost.

My garden book will someday contain all the following:

Plant logs

–        Illustrations of plants to learn their appearance so I can tell what is a plant or weed

–        Log of what bed contained what item when; so I can put it elsewhere in the next planting.

–        Record when things start to sprout and are ripe.

–        Different traits of different kinds of the same vegetables or for fruits, the tomato.

–        Length of time of harvest

–        Planting techniques – distance of seeds to ensuring flat ground for watering

–        Ways to repel certain insects

Related gardening tasks

–        Brands of garden soil or compost and what is good or not good.

–        Contacts for seeds or sand or other useful garden items

–        Coupons, articles that might come in seed magazines or gardening stores.

–        What items make good anti weed repellents i.e.: newspaper verses mesh

–        My observations of how useful different types of gardening tools are.

–        Breeding notes if you’re trying to create a new type of flower.

–        Record of where different things are stored for later access.

Experiences:

–        Things I’ve learned from others

–        Things I’ve learned from experience

–        Successful compost techniques

–        Handouts from classes and gardening items off the internet

–        Rigging and terraces for vertical growing plants

Other web sites that provide some great info:

http://littlehouseinthesuburbs.com/2010/12/garden-planner-for-notebooks.html

http://www.stonepylon.com/garden/gdnntbk.htm

http://gardening.about.com/od/vegetables/Vegetables_Gardening_Profiles_Growing_Tips_and_Ideas.htm

The following suggestions might be obvious to some; but, I didn’t make this discovery until in recent years. Usually when it came to doing my taxes I would type things up each year and then use a calculator to add them up. I would have to type up the values more than once because my 10 Key skills are notorious for doing an occasional typo.

Well brilliant of brilliance, I finally realized that I could use Microsoft’s Excel or Microsoft Work’s version of excel (free) to do the math for me.

This is the plan.

First of all I create a template that will be used year after year.

Second, I create a section for each utility that I need to document in my taxes.  This will usually cover about 26 rows in the spreadsheet. One row header, one row totals and for city utilities I have two rows assigned to each month. Under row one I input the amount of paid and on the cell directly below that I have how it was paid for i.e. online, in person, check or credit card.

Third, I have all the values summed up in the far left column so that I can have a total for the year at the bottom. By having a horizontal row per month I sometimes paid two bills in one month and so I can sum up the totals.

Fourth, once I have inputted all the data for that specific utility or expense I have the year total at the bottom of that utility. I repeat the process by copying the format cells to be a duplicate for all utilizes and I name them per what they are.

Fifth, I want all the final results of the individual utilities to be displayed at the top of the spread sheet for easy reference. I have headers for each utility and then the total in the cell directly beneath. The data under the header at the top of the spreadsheet is refers to the cell that has a specific utility total further down the spreadsheet.

That way when my tax accountant looks at the totals at the top, he can put in the necessary info, but if he has questions then he can simply see where excel is getting the total from and that’ll tell him more details of a specific payment.

Sixth, I will group income together and expenses in separate areas so that like subjects are close together. I do the same for Doctor, labs, and prescription payments.

Finally, I name the document with the appropriate year and bring a print out of the excel sheet to meet with the accountant and I include it on a thumb drive so that the accountant can have a soft copy if needed.

For the next year I should be able to bring up the past year and rename it to the current year. Then I only have to delete the blocks of old data from last year and insert the new values. The formulas and summations are already present on the spreadsheet should work from year to year.

This is the way I try to resolve not having to start from scratch each year and as a result my tax preparation is taken less time each year and the accuracy is provided by the capabilities of Excel.

Here are some ideas I can use for the future. Maybe I should do my tax entries at the end of each month instead of all at once at the end of the year. That way, things are fresh on my mind of what goes where. But doing this in small installments I am not as likely to lose small details. Also, I have a box where I naturally drop all my paid bills and receipts. That way, I only have to work with the contents of that box when I do my taxes.

I hope this will be of help for anyone who might still be adding up all their totals by hand or calculator. Excel is a better at math and I am.

Today’s discussion touches on ways I compensate for weakness or work to a strength. Let me give some specific examples. Monday I told my story “Balloon Head” at the story teller’s festival hosted by the Weber state, (http://community.weber.edu/storytelling/). The story seemed to be received very well. Anyway, I do not have the best vision so seeing and understanding a street sign for easy travel is a short coming. Since I knew I’d be performing on Monday I arranged to stay in Layton on Sunday night. I also arranged for my host to accompany me to the two locations I’d need to be at during the festival. The virtue of doing this was that Sunday afternoon traffic is much lighter and we had a chance to scope things out in an environment to our liking. I didn’t have to hassle with commuter traffic.

I did the same thing when having to teach a class to fellow employees on software while working for Intel. While in Oregon, on Sunday afternoon I was able to drive to the business location where I’d be conducting the training and get back to my hotel again. That one time drive gave the necessary familiarity of driving around in a new city.

A third example, I find that I tend to do other things than writing when I get home from work. How do I compensate for that when I want to write new material? I go to work early and write in the morning before I start my work day. Then I can go home at the end of the day and do other projects and not feel ‘guilty about it.

When it comes to exercise if I have a choice between working out and having a one on one with my mattress then Matt usually wins out. I am much more inclined to exercise after work.

So, what is one of my strengths? I have a pretty easy time getting up and going to work if I need to. I guess that means I’m a morning person. The virtues to this is that if my company permits me to work four ten hour days I’m eager to do it because I don’t find working ten hours isn’t any more tiring then eight hours. Another example is when I become involved in a volunteer organization I often lean toward duties that involve scheduling since I’m not normally shy about calling someone to remind them of something if that is under my jurisdiction..

The suggestion is that you evaluate your weaknesses and your strengths and then alter your life to compensate or take advantage of each.

I have heard some wonderful advice about how to do big projects. Often I hear handling big projects in small steps. I often find this suggestion very useful. I am often a bit of a procrastinator and doing something small is much more manageable and doesn’t seem so intimidating.

But there are times, when you just want to get the whole kit and caboodle over with. I would like to discuss the advantage of doing a big project all at once, namely a storage shed or an office.

One process that I find very helpful is to take everything out of the office at once. This includes furniture and book shelves. The virtue of this is that I am able to vacuum in places that haven’t seen the light of day for years. Some people would be even be willing to wash or touch up walls. (For me, it’s one miracle at a time). If the items of the office are too heavy and you’re doing the project alone (I’m a bit of a wimp) than I just move the furniture around. Since my last big project I have purchased sliders that should help me move big items in the future.

With the room complexly clear I am then in the reposition the furniture and redesign of the office. You’ve used the equipment enough now that you know what items need to be more easily accessed and you know that items need to be positioned close enough for plug access.

You can reposition the books, hardware, and software for most frequent use to match to easiest access.

The point is that once you put the things back in the office that you want, you have the stuff you don’t want in the office still in the front room. At this point you can determine what needs to be thrown away, donated, or what can be given to recycle resources.

The advantage of the all-day project for a storage shed is that I am able to organize like items in like areas or like use. My camping equipment is now located all in one area for easy access. And the same goes for other item of like use.

One thing that is also useful is that if you have friends that want to do their ‘big’ projects, maybe you can negotiate labor swaps. I’ll give you four hours of labor and you give me four. Many hands make a lighter load, right? And the task is more tolerable when you can do it with friends or family.

Well that’s it for today.  Success to you, when you start and finish your next big project.

If you have some ideas of what you think are unique ways to store items, organization ideas, or other ways of efficiency, please feel free to comment.

Okay this might be a little different for you. Throughout my life I have had to kind of watch my pennies. (Who hasn’t) but as a result I do not spend money on artsy little containers for storage. I have always liked the concept behind the phrase “Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do, or Do Without.”

In tribute to this concept I’d like to let you know what I have done to help organize my possessions or items at work that may not be normally used and some that are.

When I was the administrative assistance for the IT department for a technology company one of my responsibilities was to I managed the extra hardware of the company. It would always drive me crazy trying to store computer key boards with their cords. So my solution would be to wrap the key board with the cord and then put a rubber band around the key board/cord and thus I could store the keyboards without any tails flopping around. The same useful rubber bands are good for mice.

Something I found to be useful is old zip lock bags. I realize that for sanitation reasons, I shouldn’t use a zip log too often even after multiple cleanings for food. So if the bag was still in good condition I would use the clean zip lock bag to hold small electronic devices like mice, hard drives, cassette recorders and power cords. The virtue of this is that not only was the loose articles tightly confined but I had the advantage of keeping dust out off the electronics. and I can grab a select assortment in the one specific zip lock if I need to find something. This has been very useful.

I wager other people have fund that the metal twists that are used to seal loafs of bread can later be used to hold small rows of Christmas lights. I will loop the strand of lights around the palm of my hand until I have several loops. Then I tie / twist them together by the bread twist. I put these contained rows of lights in put in a grocery bags so that I can access them later and they don’t get dusty.

Since I live in an area of the country that is prone for earth quakes, I thought; what about all my dishes in the cupboards? It looks silly (but I’m a silly person so…) I put rubber bands around the knobs of my kitchen cabinets. If the earth shakes, maybe the rubber bands will keep the doors closed enough that things will stay within the cu cupboards. That is if the quake isn’t a bad shaker right?

At church I remember someone collection a bunch of old and cleaned out soup or vegetable cans. They put pretty paper on the outside. Paste on the message “YES YOU CAN” and gave it to fellow sisters as a pretty storage device for pencils etc. Even years later, I still use my can, and still look at the message pasted on the outside.

If you have some ideas of what you think are unique ways to store items, organization ideas, or other ways of efficiency, please feel free to comment.