PhoneBoy Says

There hasn't been much I've wanted to say on this blog over the past several days, thus why you've been seeing mostly pictures, when I've bothered to post even those.

I suppose the biggest thing that's been going on around here is the cold that my wife has had for a week and can't seem to get rid of. She started last Friday, steadily lost her voice over the weekend, and is still trying to recover. I ended up taking Monday and Tuesday off work in order to give my wife at least some rest. My wife has been unable to sleep well due to her own coughing. The fact that Gracie wakes up in the middle of the night and wants mommy doesn't help either. Last night was the first night in about a week where she was able to sleep semi-normally. Let's hope that continues.

Meanwhile, I think Gracie has finally succumb to the cold as she is starting to be stuffy. She's had a hard time keeping food down as well, prompting both parents to rush in with "buckets" (large tupperware containers) for her to barf in. We're trained. I also spent a bunch of time yesterday cleaning out the car from when Gracie barfed after lunch.

Jaden doesn't seem to have caught anything yet. Meanwhile, I am drinking Airborne as often as I can right now to try and keep the cold at bay. I have some nasal congestion, but nothing that makes me anywhere approaching miserable.

At least it's been relatively nice outside this week. Monday and Tuesday were warm, the rest of the days this week were a little less warm, but still perfectly reasonable outside. Sunshine and no rain is always a welcome change of pace.

Who knows what's going on this weekend. However, Mothers Day is going to be interesting since the rest of the extended family plans on avoiding us like the plague. Maybe I can give mommy some time to herself or something. Who knows.

That's what she's saying anyway…

I know I've talked about Paul McKenna before and what his "diet" is. A pointer from his website brings me to a podcast he did where he describes the system in about 9 minutes, including the "tapping" technique that I know I posted a video about. Have a listen.

Paul McKenna's Weightloss Podcast

The Sun

Okay, it's a day late, but we didn't really celebrate her birthday yesterday. Actually we did, but that's a story for another post. Taken with, cropped, and posted with a Nokia N95.

What websites do you visit every day?
Submitted by Chez Michelle.

I don't visit websites very often. I start and end my day in Google Reader, where I am able to keep up with the sites I am interested in without specifically having to visit them unless there is something I want to specifically look at.

Tomorrow (or maybe today now) is my father-in-law's birthday. My mother-in-law is currently out-of-town, so my wife was going to invite him over for dinner and make him two of his favorite things: Fettuccine Alfredo and Cherry Pie. Um, those are a couple of my favorite things too. Is this a birthday present for me, too? :) (Nope, my birthday isn't until July)

This is where the "eat what you want" diet has been such a wonderful thing. I can have some of that and not feel the least bit guilty about it. I can have enough that I will be satisfied, or at the very least not hungry. I will eat it slowly and deliberately. I will enjoy it tremendously, hopefully not to the point of eating to excess.

Speaking of the diet, I seem to be making some slow progress towards my goal. I am getting better at choosing the right portion sizes to eat and I am generally not cleaning my plate. I am doing visualizations to "see" where it is I want to be at the end of this process. For the first time in a while, I weigh below 260 lbs. I am noticing some small changes in my body shape. While I'd like to see quicker results, I am happy with the results I am seeing so far.

I'm using the word "inbox" here, but I am not just referring to email. I'm referring to everything that represents "what you feel the need to get done."

The biggest leap in "productivity" I've made is, at least once a day, making sure my email inboxes (work and personal) are at zero. That means everything is either filed for later, actioned, or deleted. While that takes care of a lot of the "inbox," it's not all. There's the Google Reader. There's my physical whiteboard. There's Twitter. There's my podcasts, both in iTunes and on my Nokia phones. There's probably some other things I'm not thinking of.

There are some things I have to do more short-term, for example study for my CISSP test in a couple of weeks. I was never that great at studying for tests when I was in school. It's been years since I've had to take any sort of test that required studying, so what skills I had are rusty at best.

Then of course there's all the places I filed things "to do." When will I get to those? Do I care? It feels like the list never ends, but I take solace in the fact that I get what I can done each day. That which doesn't get done will still be there tomorrow. If I misprioritized something, or accidentally deleted an email I shouldn't have, if it is truly important, it will likely be sent to me again.

I don't follow any of the official "organizing" systems like David Allen's Getting Things Done or the stuff I learned in the 7 Habits class. But I do try and minimize the number of inboxes, make sure to leave everything in as clean a state as possible so that I can clean it again the next day. Periodically, I figure out which things I am reading/doing are no longer useful and remove them from the stream.

Speaking of that never-ending inbox, time to get back to it. Or to bed. Whichever.