Final Farewell
I have finally decided that I will no longer be continuing this blog. The updates have been infrequent at best and since I am trying to simultaneously promote my my other website Ryan & Peggy, so in order for one to succeed I need to stop spending time fiddling with one and I’ve decided that this is the one.
The choice of which blog to continue seemed a very obvious to me since this site runs days with no visitors. I would regularly get Google summaries telling me that no one has visited the site. That is likely due to the long periods of time between blog posts. This is a well known way of killing a blog, and it has certainly killed this one.
My love for organizing hasn’t changed so on Ryan & Peggy I will still write about organizing tips and things I’ve done in our home to keep our posessions neat and orderly.
Part-time blogging is much harder than I originally thought. It’s challenging to find that extra hour or two to write and read other blogs, comment on other blogs, read my stats. It’s a lot to do when you only have a few hours a week to do it, and if I have to do it twice as much for two blogs, things just don’t get done. My time would be better spent focusing on one and promoting it.
Feel free to read over and print any articles you find on the site but after a while I will be removing it completely from the world wide web.
I would love if you could check out my other website Ryan & Peggy and sign-up for it’s RSS feed so you can follow my wife and I as we go through this crazy obstacle course we call life.
Does Organizing Ever Stop?
Unfortunately, the answer is no but the all-day cleaning and organizing sessions could. In order to get to a point where your home or office is organized to a point where you don’t need to spend hours cleaning it (unless it already is) will take some work and some elbow grease. Maintaining it is he easy part.
I just found out that my wife is pregnant with our first child so I have decided to go through all the areas of our home that stuff has been stored and unused to decide if we need it any longer. If we don’t need it then we will give it away, sell it or throw it out but the key is to remove it from our home. That is what will allow us to have more space and much more flexibility. Also since we will be getting baby furniture, baby clothes and many other things for our new child we will need to remove stuff to allow for it.
We are a recently married couple so we have stuff in our home that we each accumulated while we were single and that means we have two of almost everything and have not yet “combined” our possessions completely. So this means we have too much stuff in our home and we need to get rid of some of it. In our home we have a lot of storage space (fortunately AND unfortunately) so we’ve been able to hide it well but the time has now come to go through all the boxes to give away what we no longer use or need.
If you are looking for anything in particular for your home, just let me know and I’ll see if we do plan to get rid of it, it’ll be yours.
Death of the Blackberry
In early April my Blackberry died on me. I think something went wrong with the battery because when I first started having problems with it, it had trouble turning on and it froze. Later it did not turn on at all. When I bought it, I purchased a warranty that at the time i didn’t think I needed. So I called up the company and in a matter of 5 minutes they decided and told me that they would just send me a check for the price I paid for the unit.
I was thrilled to know that I got to use the Blackberry for 10 months for $25 (the price of the warranty). But unfortunately, I had to go without my time management tool. I didn’t realize how dependent on it I had become. For the next while I was late and forgetting about my appointments. I didn’t like that I was becoming less reliable and had to regularly apologize for my lack of punctuality.
During this time I was researching different units that would suit my needs and desires. I wanted a unit that had a decent organizer as well as wifi so I coud check my email without having to pay for data. Some Blackberry’s offered this but were much too expensive. The Blackberry Pearl with Wifi had just come out but still was not available to the general public so that was not an option. Also, most smartphones or PDA’s available with Wifi capabilities were close to $500 if I bought them unlocked (which I wanted to do since I could care less about the phone feature).
Then my coworker told me the full functionality of his iPod Touch. It is essentially a Wifi device but nothing beyond that because it is basically the iPhone without the calling capabilities. I absolutely fell in love with it because it met all the criteria that I wanted in an electronic organizer and Wifi device. The only downside was that they were around $300 for the 8GB unit. This was way too much for me because I didn’t have that kind of money to blow on an organizer.
After about a month of wishing and saving, we had receieved a letter in the mail congratulating us because we had won a 16GB iPod Touch with a carrying case (it was actually my wife who won it). The contest that we won it from was one we entered 5 months earlier, so we had completely forgotten that we entered it. We were happy and surprised at the same time because it had approximately a $525 value. The notice came out of nowhere.
So I have been using it for about 2 and a half months now and I think it’s wonderful. It is exactly what I wanted and needed in terms of an organizer and Wifi device. We have wireless at home and I also have it at work so I have access 90% of the time. It is a great little unit that has become almost a necessity in my life. I say “almost” because I’m sure I could live without it but it is becoming so handy and useful that it will take some adjusting to live without it. My next post will be a review of the iPod Touch and I’ll share all the features about it that I love.