Ayn's Multiple World

Really Nice Day, but Not All Here Yet

Good morning … this is us and there is PLEEEEENNNNNNTY of time! WooHOO! It’s now about 3:15 am and we’ve been up for a bit just getting our doodads and gadgets to be working.

Hmm, now it’s like after that … about 3:40 am. I’m not sure just what happened. I do know that in the time we figured out how to back up Outlook Business Contact Manager (Outlook BCM).

Ok, now it’s 4 am. Do you understand at all how much time gets twittled?! Sheesh. What’s changed since the last comment? Hmm, not sure. We DID go to the bathroom and get more coffee, and maybe we watched a little more CNN. Could that have taken all that time though? I guess I’m just drifty.

I hate to be up all this time and not spending my time well. I guess though I’m not ready to get into things too deeply.

Ok, so we’re being floaty … that can’t last too long, hmm? Just have to get in my groove. I like to type and am up in the morning before Sweetie gets up. Yup, yup he’s being dreamy still. Last night we spent some time together. We both were home fairly early so we ate … separate meals though, but then we watched a couple of shows together and were fuzzy 

I don’t know where we lost things …. But after a while I remember waking up from a very comfortable position thinking I should get my medicine and go to bed. He wears out my little bunny batteries.

Yesterday was only a so-so day all together. We were supposed to have had the client party, but I guess without my knowledge Sister had decided to cancel out the party, and she also decided to send people home early. She said she was surprised I’d come in at all because the weather was bad. It had rain/snowed all night, and then on the way to work it was sleeting. I’d figured though I didn’t want to waste a day at home where I wasn’t going to get paid, so if she didn’t cancel, then neither would I. It’s a low brow test of nerves ;)

Many of the clients weren’t there … But, the day went through and I barely came out of my corner. There was a little bit of time when the CSO person came back to see me in my office. But, I figured that it was more a social call, and I wasn’t in the mood at that time to be social. So that was a bit of a bother. Usually I don’t mind the interruption, but this time I’d been working on my projects … I tried to be nice and let it go. I was glad that she had her staffing called and she stopped killing time with me. It’s kind of bad manners, but I know that we’ve developed this kind of social relationship with her. I like her … just didn’t want to give up my free time.

I think a good bit of the time yesterday went into working through the program again. Each day I’m learning new things. I’m just amazed how long it is taking to conquer a more complete sense of this program. It is very comprehensive. In the morning Karla had come in and we had some fun with her, in part telling her some really fun stuff on the computer. She still wants to sit back and think that is all for brighter minds, but I’ve no doubt Karla has a bright mind and lotsa heart. She still might not want to be bogged down with all my details, but I think if she had more computer ability she’d make good use of it. Part of our job is to encourage the staff to use technology whenever they can.

She said something that was a little bothersome and I am not sure why she said it.

She said, that she didn’t care what the rest of them thought, but that she really liked me. At the time we thought what an odd way to put anything, but we didn’t feel like going into what others may or may not be thinking of me, because I saw it going down a gossip hole. So, we just took the complement and said something like of course, I’m really a nice person … whatever others may think. Neither of us took it back further. I think it was more a novel idea to her, and I don’t think she meant to insult me. I was really proud of her this week anyway, because at her other job, she’d gotten employee of the year. I thought this was really fantastic, and I’m glad that Sister must have seen it too, because she told Karla to put some kind of note of it up on the bulletin board. It’s such a nice honor … and I wanted her to know how much I thought of her skills and abilities. I really think she does a fine job with the clients and to know that her other peers thought as much too … well it was just kinda cool! Mostly I think it’s because she’s learned to listen without getting overwhelmed. Good Karla!!

I’m not really sure what I learned yesterday specifically over what I’d learned on other days. I do know that at the end of the day, I figured I was going to try exporting the program. I did this through the email and I did it as back-up on my flash drive. I never know if I really know how to do this sort of thing until I try and sometimes it takes several efforts. Even this morning as I was then importing the work program into the home program, I couldn’t figure out how to back-up my files first … It was recommending that I do this, but I didn’t see anything from the file menu or the others across the way, but I guess a week or so, I’d come across the process doing something else and I must have saved a note, because I found the directions and then backed-it-up, although it was after I’d successfully (fortunately) had imported the program. Just for sake of memory … I resaved the directions for later on Monday morning when I get the program back to work with weekend changes. After several times of using things on the new program, I start to remember that I had those options and how to utilize them.

It was like this all week. Just learning one thing after another. For an example, yesterday I discovered that there were business tasks AND regular tasks, so then it became an objective to learn how to access them and write reports from them, etc.

It’s like layer after layer of skin being added to my mind as to moving around in the program. I’ve got the weekend now so I’d really like to sharpen my senses as to how to be using everything all together. It really can be an overwhelming program in that it DOES SOOOOOOO MUCH!

Hmm, looking into it now. It looks like I don’t have any immediate email although it seems to have transferred over some stuff from the work computer. It gets added to a “journal” which seems to track business activity. I have it set so that it records actions of the main for programs of accounts, projects, opportunities and tasks. I also have it set to record document changes for Word, Excel, publishing, etc. I could have it track individual business contacts, but there’s no reason to do that quite yet. I might for behavioral or annual reasons later want to track one or more clients, but it’s enough now just to realize I can do this.

There seems to be something that allows two calendars to be saved, which is kind of cool because I had one started from home and one started from work. There is a link in “My calendars” that allows me to view both side by side, or just one at a time.

There are tasks at the bottom of the calander. I’m not sure how it gets distinguished, but it appears that it collects both business tasks and regular tasks. The next connection is with the contacts. We discussed them somewhat this week. The system suggests that you can use contacts for personal ones and then the business contact for just that. We still are using both personal and business contacts for both. We see the advantage of working from home or business simultaneously and because one seems now to transfer over with export/import and the other through the me program, it would seem that we’re covered and backed up. Maybe we could back up the personal at the end of the week or weekend. Right now we’re making changes in the business contacts just to make sure they are useable to that system.

The next tab available to us is the tasks tab. Just like the other we have tasks that are regular and other tasks available to us as business tasks. I have to remember now exactly how we got to the regular tasks other than the straight through formula. I know that if we are working in business projects, then from that screen we can create a project task. Hmm, that’s interesting … I just checked out a report – activity and it seems that we can connect to live links from that and even though email was gathered from work and noted on the business contact report, we can still open the email from here. It seems to have transferred over and become very easy to control. I do think we have to be a little more careful in siphoning out the email we don’t want before saving it. It could become a drain.

Cool, it seems that I can send by email a report to be opened with Excel … let me see now what that seems like from the opening end.

Report: Activity by Business Contact
Filter Applied: No

Saturday, December 20, 2008


Item Type Subject Linked To Created On
Business Contact: Absences
Business Project Absences - 000 Absences 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project in-house - 001 Absences 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project miss work - 002 Absences 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project leave - 003 Absences 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Contact: Community
Business Project application - 129 Community 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project interview - 132 Community 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Contact: Demographics
Opportunity Collect Demographics for report Demographics 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Contact: Enrichment
Business Project music - 139 Enrichment 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project special services - 113 Enrichment 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project special program - 119 Enrichment 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project art - 120 Enrichment 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Contact: Finance, Citizen's Automobile
Task Pay Citizen's Bill $455.98 - 12-10-08 Finance, Citizen's Automobile 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Contact: Functional Math and money
Business Project math - 105 Functional Math and money 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project money - 116 Functional Math and money 12/20/08 2:55 AM
Business Project time - 116 Functional Math and money 12/20/08 2:55 AM



This is a portion of the report … the first is copy and paste and the second will be a jpg file. Let’s see which one works best. I like a lot the option of making reports, just gotta practice over time making the best use of them. I would also like to set some up for CARF.

Ok, back again … we had to do some manipulating of software. We hadn’t realized that we only had 3 more days to test out the Snagit program. We really did have to purchase it. We didn’t have a copy on this computer, and we don’t have an updated copy at our work computer. I think too when we get in the other copy we will make sure we download it to some of the staff computers IF it’s not locked to so many users. That’s always worrisome.

The newer version of Snagit has a smaller decent size window for normal usage. I like it. It’s going to be something left up on the screen I think because it really doesn’t take up too much room. Looks good! Love the program and will have to learn the new tricks … I think it’s going to make it easier to capture like videos and scrolling screens. We’ll have to see though … don’t want to go there now.

Back to the Outlook program. The above reports are as they say reports of activity by business contact. I just copied a small part of the report from excel and I was happy to see that I could easily manipulate the report from there. I took out a couple of columns that weren’t critical. You can see from the above also that I added some business projects that are program orientated. This is one way I’ll try to track down what is happening to all these programs though I don’t have it locked down how to do this. Right now the info is in the Outlook program and that was the most important step at this point. You can see that we have the subjects – immediate form linked to program areas which were placed in business contacts. Then the business contacts are linked to either programs or to Performance Analysis.

Let’s see … when could I use this report? It seems like a lot of the other reports in that it makes me feel complete as if all my efforts are collectible, but it’s still hard to connect to all this information. I’m just not grasping the big picture although its been the top priority all week. Maybe we should keep moving on? How to connect next?

Hmm, looking now at their document for learning how to use the program. I think we checked that out at various times of the week, but never make it past the first pages.

Hmm, remember to connect mentally Opportunities to “potential business.” Projects then might be more toward “actual business.”

Hmm, in reviewing it looks like products and services transfer over for no real problems. Basically, it’s something this week I spent time developing and I’m happy that I can work with it at home. This is such a tremendous program. I don’t know if I’ve said much about it this week. I think I said a little in that one letter to my mother, but basically, I took from a detailed list of services I offer to the center and I gave each a unit price according to the average amount of minutes I thought the item would take to complete. I divided minutes by hours and then multiplied that times my normal hourly salary amount of $22.28. I know I’m not worth a lot, but I’d like to think I have potential! I also calculated a unit cost which gave an amount of “mark-up” for my job … this came from multiplying the unit price times the percentage of effort we felt that item deserved, so like if I had to work harder like understanding a program I might rate that item as 87% effort while another job like completing Qnotes might be ranked at 76% effort. I’m still not sure how this might benefit my business records, but I’m thinking that I can make reports that will somewhere down the way make sense at least from the standpoint of determining effort … right now it’s just a nice comparable record to see how hard I’m working.

Each day I end up adding the $22.28’s times 8 hours, so I’m making obviously the same salary each day, but for now I want to become better and better at recording my time spent on different items. Right now there are about 90 items. I haven’t come up with a product yet basically because I’d rather list for example that I’m writing a report more than delivering a report - on the service items though I haven’t figured out a way to make either discounts or taxable items necessary.

Hmm, still don’t see anything we could do with the marketing campaign, but it does seem to give access to reports, so that maybe I could use it for form letters to my clients parents … I don’t think that be real easy, but I know there are ways to use mail addresses and do a mail merge. Usually, I hand adopt my messages and I don’t use them often.

Hmm, we’re back again … It’s about 8:30 am now. We’ve been anywhere but here over this last allocation of time. I don’t know how far we got with outlook, I know the part we went off on though was in trying to find a connection between the computer and phone. I don’t know if I used to have a cord, but I looked over everything and can’t seem to find one now. That’s very irritating. There’s some way to connect the business contact file on that devise, but again … ran up until that point and then had to stop.

There were other things going on too. Rich woke up about then because Bob called … Then after that we ran into a bad period with Rich. The basic theme is that we don’t understand why we can’t do things with him and Bob or have Bob come over to just stop by or go out to eat with him or something. I think Rich is trying to make progress but he’s going about the speed of a slug. Pretty much the affect this morning was a deep feeling of rejection. It’s like he doesn’t trust either Bob or me to handle knowing each other. If I haven’t heard it in 15 years, it’s not going to be heard different as to not tolerating him. I know he has stuff going for and against him, but I’ve never disqualified him from being a best friend of Rich.

Basically then the affect of rejection was similar to the other day with Dr. Marvin. We just closed down and then that left Rich feeling bad because we weren’t talking to him. We don’t mean to not talk to him … just we can’t make words come out of our mouth. We closed down in a sleep position hoping that he would just leave – by this time he’d decided to go out to breakfast with Bob, but then that got held up for about 20 minutes after he was on his way out the door. I thought I was too wound up to sleep and he’d already realized we hadn’t had our medicine yet. So, when he went out to the living room, we got up and took the hottest longest shower possible. We had all that working against us. The bad subject of not meeting Bob, lack of medicine AND our feet were cold, which is an auto-regress even if all the rest were not involved. Plus, we were tired in that we’d been up since 2:30 am.

Ok, enough of that. We did some other positive stuff after Rich left – which was about the time we were slowly crawling out of the shower. First we took our medicine, then we got dressed including socks and shoes to prevent cold feet, and then we cleaned up the house including starting the dishwasher. That is making me feel like almost ten thousand bucks. It still is a sore spot that Bob can’t come over, but at least I can think of getting into the routine of cleaning up in case some day he can stop over. I have to work on the most encouraging facets of this situation.

Beside I think it will make Rich feel more positive coming into an orderly situation. I can’t say we were there before he left. I really don’t want him thinking I don’t like him just because I am too fizzled to talk. We also have to think through that we should be getting back to the gym. We put a tentative time at noon to be going, but I’m not sure what all has to be done by then. The first thing that comes to mind is getting a lock for my stuff. I would like to go in just with shorts to avoid the entire changing dilemma, but I don’t think that’s going to work, because one way or another we’ll still have a coat to deal with. I think we’re just going to need adjusting to the part where we start off in the gym locker room – and to that we will need a lock. I already interrupted Rich once to stop by and get the one medicine we’re short of, and we don’t want to interrupt his space with Bob to be needy as in asking him to get a lock too. This should be something we are able to do for ourselves.

So, ok, that’s enough of all that. I’m not sure where we are at, but we should let you know that a sympathy fudgsicle was eaten in behalf of elevating our moods. Ok, well we don’t really need that good an excuse to eat a fudgsicle, but it makes me feel more efficient!

Ok, where do we go from here? I think we’ve gotten a little into the Outlook program, but we really don’t want to go back into that quite yet. I’d like to think that we think of other important things during the week. Mostly though as a summary … most of our time this week went into figuring out the program. We did do some groups, but we missed the leadership group for Circles and the Thinking Group. That was a consequence of the change of schedule for the client Christmas party and sister sending people home early. Shoot, did we do ANYthing else important over the week? I do know that the Qnotes got avoided and that’s going to be a harsh reality, especially thinking that we’re going to need then doing some during the break. I don’t know if we could get the statistical part done – the part where we write on the goal data sheets the information we’re going to type out, but that’s our best bet so far. If we could at least get that done, then it wouldn’t be so hard to get the rest figured out while we’re at home. If we don’t get that part done, then we’re going to need worrying about bringing extra folders home to be looking up points.

Ok, good, good. I think that was a coherent thought. Now, what are we going to think through next?

Hmm, we haven’t looked at the housing situation for a bit. I did note that when we opened up our screens this morning that opening up the pictures of the house from the blog was one of the most critical things to first do.

Hmm, on the side … I just thought of a few more things. We had been working on a couple of projects. The one was the “Seat at the Table,” and the other was our copying over a Word document for all the entries in our blogs. We’ve since the last time we started transferred over some of the old AOL blogs to the blogger, but I’m not sure if we haven’t already lost pictures, because by the end of the month the pictures for AOL function that I believe we used for most of our journaling will be gone. There’s just not enough time even with vacation to get all those pictures transferred over if they haven’t already gone to seed. Maybe we should check that out.

Hmm first notation … in the old AOL journal there are 608 entries. This speaks to the impossibility of getting things all transferred over. Might as well bite the bullet though let’s see if the pictures are still up.

posted by Ann Marie @ 12/22/2008 03:47:00 AM Comments: 0