Hi everyone. Thank you all for all the wonderful comments! I had kinda hoped I’d get more feedback on my recent posts, and it turns out I was, but I didn’t know about it.

After an upgrade to my blogging software, I changed a setting to hold new comments for moderation before they end up on the site (to combat spammy comments). However I neglected to check the box that would have let me know when there was a comment waiting for me to look at it. I’m sorry I held your comments in the cue for so dang long– it shouldn’t happen again.

And now back to our regularly intermittent posts…

Well, it’s all out on the table. Cailin successfully defended her Ph.D. last week, and that was the keystone to all the thinking and planning that we’ve been doing for the past year or so. Now all the other decisions are clear: Cailin will start her post-doc in the UNC Geography department next fall, and I will begin working on an MFA in the Studio Art program at UNC in the fall as well! I’m taking my art full-time!

We are both really excited about the next step, but it is bittersweet. We both have a lot of friends at our workplaces, and we’ve really come to love Madison in our 5 years here. It will be hard to leave here for many reasons.

Of course, we won’t be moving for another 3 months, so it was a little weird to tell my workplace about it. But one of the principals at work wrote a recommendation for me, and there is another person from our Active Media group that will be leaving at the end of the summer as well, so it seemed only fair to let them know so they can start thinking ahead. (Which they did right away: I wrote an ad for my replacement yesterday, and it is on the site today.)

It is definitely liberating to not have to sit on a big secret like this anymore, but nothing was really definite until about 6 days ago. And I only got into school about 12 days ago. There wasn’t really anything I could say about it until the end of last week anyway. And now here it is only days later, and we’re having a garage sale this Saturday, our realtor is getting ready to list our house (open house on May 15th), we’re shopping around for apartments in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and we’re already stressing about how the heck we’re going to get all our stuff into a two-bedroom apartment.

On the other hand, we put in a garden two weeks ago, put in tomato plant starts last weekend, frisbee season is up-and-running, and we’ve got quite a full summer planned. We’re going to two weddings, getting a visit from my brother, Cailin will be teaching her first course as “Professor Orr” this summer at UW-Madison, I’ve got more than a summer’s worth of work coming my way at Planet, and I’ve got two gallery shows to get work ready for by the middle of the summer.

I’m ready to turn on the Zen switch because while stress is to be expected, I don’t want to make close friends with it. We will jump-start the Zen with a week in Florida, right after Cailin’s graduation ceremony.

Wow! Those critters over at 37 Signals sure know what they are doing. First with Basecamp, then Tada-lists, and now Backpack. They are trickling out “golden tickets” in anticipation of a Tuesday launch, as a way to get people using it and buzzing about it. I got a golden ticket, so here I am doing my duty.

I’m a fan of backpacks in general, and I even still have my backpack from high school (I’ve patched it). I used it all through college, and I still use it today. It is worn and smelly (smelly because I use it to tote my Frisbee gear to and from games) but it carries everything I need. The shoulder bag I carry to work nowadays is full of pay stubs, notes to myself, my seldom-used-PDA, pens, sketchbook, doodles, etc. Lots of useful stuff all in one place. It’s a decent metaphor for this application.

Backpack is great for me. It synthesises all the randomness of my life (especially these most recent few days, weeks, months), and gives me a way to not lose track of things. For example, I can set a reminder for “tomorrow afternoon” to call and make the car appointment I’ve been meaning to make for the past few weeks. You can even “snooze” a reminder: if I am in the middle of something, I can reset the remider time, and it will get back to me later.

Or, I can create a whole page devoted to EnchantedCeiling, where I can make notes about all the different things I want to do for the site. Pages can have notes, checklists (like Tada Lists), and for paid accounts, files and images. I can see this EnchantedCeiling page being especially helpful because I don’t get time to work on it very often, and there can LONG gaps between when I think of something and when I have time to implement it. Now I just jot it down in my Backpack, and I can work on it when I have the time: eventually.

I can see my use of this tool as being very organic. I’ll make a page about something I am going to do, and keep all the notes in that one place, and then when I am done: poof! I can delete it. Very Zen.

With all my new life changes coming right around the corner, I can use a little more Zen.