Wednesday Worksheets: Debt, Books and Agendas

This post is part of an ongoing series where I post worksheets to help you organize and clarify your life--all aspects of it!

This week's worksheets are a Monthly Debt Tracker, A Monthly Books Read Tracker, and a Weekly Agenda.

1. The Debt Tracker accounts for money in and money out and has a totaling list at the bottom; you can use it as a register for your checking account, but it's intended to help you see your total debt from all accounts, and the steps being made to combat that debt.
2. The Book Tracker has spaces for title and author, but also asks you some questions to help you metabolize what you've just read. There's space on this two-page sheet to track four books; if you read more than a book a week, just print more copies of the second page!*
3. The Agenda is divided by To Do and Should Do (which can also be used as a Want To Do) to help you prioritize each day, and I've included one that starts on Monday, because that's when I start my week, and one that starts on the more traditional Sunday.

All sheets are original to me. All sheets are free for you to use, but if you post them other places, link back to here and keep the copyright notices intact. Come back next week for three more random but useful worksheets!

• Monthly Debt Tracker
• Monthly Books Read Tracker
• Weekly Agenda

If there are any worksheets you'd like to see, contact me at pirategirljack at gmail dot com, and I'll see what I can do! Otherwise, I'll just continue to share the worksheets that I use and that have been useful for teaching me how to function like an organized adult!

*also: Good for you! More people need to read as voraciously as you.

Monday Make-It: No-Sew Teeshirt Bag

I needed a waterproof gym bag for the days when I go swimming, but I don't have any of my sewing stuff around, so I went to my trusty ol' Google and looked for "Teeshirt bag no sew" and this is what I found! It's really super simple. I did this in less than an hour, with blunt scissors; if you took more care and had sharper scissors, I don't think it'd take much more time.

Supplies:

• Old teeshirt
• Roll of duct tape
• Staples / Stapler
• Scissors

1. Turn the shirt inside out
2. Lay the shirt flat on the ground with all the seams lined up, and cut out the neck and arms to look like the top of a bag

These are terrible pictures! I'll do better next time. But check the shape you're going for here.

3. Staple the bottom edge closed all the way across, flip it up once and staple it all the way across again; it might need a little straightening to smooth it out again in between
4. Using short strips of duct tape, reinforce the seam that you just made: stick them to the back of the seam and wrap them around to the front, making sure you have enough vertical length on both sides that it sticks really well.
5. Use longer strips and go all across the shirt, side to side, seam to seam, overlapping the seam a little on each side and overlapping the strips to form a solid sheet.

See how the tape strips overlap a little?

6. Flip the shirt over and do the same to the other side.
7. Reinforce all the seams again.
8. Turn it back rightside out, clean up any edges of tape sticking out, and you have a waterproof bag!

Nice and bag-like!

Benefits:

• Cheap--the shirt was already around, all laundry-stained and the regular duct-tape cost less than $5
• Recycles what would otherwise just get tossed
• Quick, less than an hour
• Waterproof!
• Could easily be prettied up and made with better-colored tape, have more finished edges, could be decorated, etc
• Can be duplicated with every unwanted shirt until you have a bag for everything, in all sizes

Monday Inspiration: 8-27-2012

"Intention is consciousness with a vision."

-- Danielle LaPorte

Thought Question #902

(From http://thoughtquestions.com/archives/3064)

This is a tricky one, because I think the term is wrong. Being conscious of yourself is something I think everyone needs to have--how else are we supposed to know what our motivations are, what the results of our actions are, how we process information and make decisions? It's being overly aware of yourself, to the point of being unable to see the higher functions and only being able to see the little details and to worry about how others see them, that's the bad thing.

That being said, my immediate reaction to this question was everything. Depending on the day, I worry about my hair, my skin, how fat I am and how my clothes fit, whether I'm secretly sick and don't know it but others can tell and aren't telling me...I could go on. But I don't want to feed this nonsense, because I've realized it is nonsense. Most people don't look that closely at me, and I have other things to occupy myself with.

One thing I never feel self-conscious about in the usual usage of the term? My teeth. I have really crazy crooked teeth, but I don't worry about them. That's just how they are, and I don't believe that I should be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get them fixed, and to suffer all that pain, when they don't bother me. They don't get in the way of talking or eating or making out, so why should I worry?

Monday Inspirations

Because we all need something to get us through Mondays.

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is." --- Albert Einstein 

Smart man, that Einstein, and oh so quotable.

What inspiration would you like to share this Monday?

Journaling: Tips and Tricks 2

This is part of an ongoing series of posts on journaling because I like it and I want to share. You can find more posts under the "journaling" tag.

Tip 2: Consolidate your journal to increase the chance of keeping up

Unless you're really good at compartmentalizing and keeping a whole lot of things running at once (which I'm not), combine all your journals into one. I used to keep a planner, a calendar, a personal musings journal, a writing notebook, an idea notebook, a gratitude notebook, and probably about a dozen other partial notebooks with no actual defined idea of what they were. Every time, I would get maybe ten, maybe fifteen pages in, then leave them. All those unused pages! All that wasted paper! And it was so frustrating to want to do something, and to find myself forever not getting it done.

Until I consolidated.

I started this with my blogs. I used to run twelve (!) blogs, but I found it harder and harder to keep up with them. So I folded the majority of them into this one, and now it's super-easy! After that, I was looking at all the piles of unfinished notebooks laying around, each with its own purpose and each isolated, and I started thinking that I was dividing up my life too much. Psychologically, it was much more satisfying to put everything into one book. Some reasons why:

• It gives everything context. When you're keeping your gratitudes next to your memories of the day and your list of things to do, there's connections for why you're grateful, where your ideas come from, how the parts of your life inform each other.
• It's organic. This is how life actually is, everything all together.
• It organizes itself. Instead of having to keep dozens of notebooks each with a different purpose, and instead of having to cross-reference everything, it's all in one place.
• It makes your future biographers' lives easier--because of the straight-forwardness of it.
• It's holistic. Instead of seeing yourself as a series of slices, you can see your life and your thoughts and your emotions as one cohesive whole.

Now, this isn't to say that I have only one notebook at a time, really. As I mentioned in the last post, my "journal" is actually a collection of notebooks and blogs. There are notebooks and scraps of paper all over. But the scraps all come back, eventually, to one notebook--the current month's composition book--and that one holds everything that needs holding. It also gets annotations of what I'm reading, what posts I publish, anything I submit, and so on, so that the off-site things are also in context. All the other notebooks are nets, and this one is the boat that pulls them all in.

I think sometimes in this world, we're encouraged too much to separate up the parts of our lives, and I think when we do it too often or for too long, we lose the context. We forget that all these parts come from one whole, and that the whole is who we are, really, not the slivers.

Do you keep lots of separate journals, or just one? How do you organize what books you're writing in at any one time? Would you consider consolidating?

Journaling: Tips and Tricks 1

This is the first of an ongoing series on jounraling, because I like it and I want to share it with others.

Tip 1: Find A Book You Like

I can't stress this enough. Seriously. Some people can write on anything, but for most people, just to get started, you have to really like what you're writing on. I'd bet you haven't really thought about it--I never did for a long time--but take a moment now:

• Do you like the paper you're writing on? Is it smooth enough? Is it thick enough? Are the lines spaced the way you like?
• Do you like the size? Are you more likely to take it everywhere and keep coming back to it if it's smaller? Larger?
• Does it have enough pages? Do you fill them up at a consistent enough speed that you know how many pages you need in a month?
• Do you like the cost? If you're like me, and you fill them quickly, maybe you'd like to downgrade to something cheaper that you like just as much? If you're a slower-filler, maybe you could splurge on something more expensive that makes you feel special?
• Is it just nice enough to make you want to write in it? Being overly pretty can make the books intimidating to some people--is not wanting to spoil such a pretty thing keeping you from writing?
• Does it remind you of something nice, comforting or encouraging? If it reminds you too much of school work you didn't like doing--say, if you're using a spiral-bound notebook or something--maybe try switching it for a nicer notebook?
• Do you have enough of them? See, the thing is, a person's "journal" is actually usually a collection of notebooks placed all over the house to catch ideas and stories and notes. It might also include online or computer-based journals and planners, blogs like this one, published articles and essays and stories, collaborative work, whatever. Do you have enough of the journaling parts you need in place to make it effective?

What notebooks or notebook analogues do you like the best? Personally, my favorite notebooks are those ones from Eco Greenroom that come in groups of three or five at Target, but the cost is too high. I use them for special things like conferences and residencies at school, and for the bulk of my everyday writing I use college-ruled composition books. I've always loved them, and these days you can get them in nice colors and patterns. And if you buy them around this time of year, you can hit the back-to-school discounts and stock up for months!

New Home

(which sounds like a space colony, maybe in the Firefly universe...)

I now live in a corner of my mom's livingroom on two mattresses stacked into a bed and a few plastic crates arranged into a shelving unit. I feel a little like an immigrant in an old movie, especially when I'm folding laundry or something equally as domestic. But I'm starting to settle in, and now that I have internet, I can start building back into a real living pattern, instead of acting like it's basically a vacation. Which it sort of was, until I had no more excuses for not doing stuff.

The weirdest part about moving to NC? It's a higher elevation, and even though it's not much higher, it's enough that I feel like I can't catch my breath sometimes, and I'm really easily tired. Seriously, it's like I have a cold or something, except I don't. This happens every time I come up here, but I never stayed more than a week or so, so I don't know how long it'll take to adapt.

I haven't found a job yet, but I did join a gym, which has been pretty great. It's big enough that they have a pool, and I'm already feeling stronger after only a handful of visits. And the cost of keeping my membership (which isn't much) will spur me to get a job sooner, rather than later. The finances won't last until the end of the term, which I was hoping I could make it do, but Things Happened and now it won't work, and I didn't really expect it to anyway, so there's that.

Today I started sorting things out. Tomorrow, I'm working on building a pattern, and a routine. I've been without one for ages, and it's weird having to start from scratch, like I never had one at all. But I'm getting used to the idea that I don't have to go back, and things are this way now.

So there's that.