Highlights from my 16 days off:

1. Only responded to 2 work emails!
2. Went on a motorcycle ride through Carnation, Fall City, Snoqualmie, and North Bend to Rattlesnake Lake
3. Took the dogs and spent the day at Rattlesnake Lake two days later.  Got sunburned knees.
4. Gardened, repotted plants, bought pretty flowers
5. Took a nap in the sun
6. Washed my cars
7. Got a pedicure
8. Rode around in the Miata with the top down
9. Put new floor mats, door sills, and a retro fuel door lid on the Miata
10. Picked out a hot tub and started working on a trade for it
11. Met my new neighbors
12. Read Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks (mind blowing)
13. Went to two Storm games
14. Played tour guide with visiting family, including antiquing in Snohomish
15. Became obsessed with antiques!   Went to many area antique shops and spent hours on ebay looking for cool metal household objects.  Bought an antique crank pencil sharpener, several padlocks, a hand mixer, two phones, crate labels and an adding machin e!
16. Watched the first half of the first season of 30 Rock all in one sitting
17. Upped my Netflix subscription
18. Learned about irrigation systems by trial and error
19. Bought a garage door opener and then learned from the installer that one piece doors need chain or belt drives, not screw drives like the Sears salesman said
20. Installed a dimmer in the dining room and a timer on a bathroom fan
21. Installed cable lines from the main box through the attic and into the walls for the office, Frank’s room and my room
22. Hung art
23. Discovered Third Place Books’ Commons (thanks, Frank!), listening to reggae while eating BBQ and watching kids dance
24. Finished a few old blog entries
25. Downloaded 8000 songs on my Zune Pass
26. Emissions tested and registered the Miata
27. Bought painting supplies and an interior design book
28. Went to BBQs
29. Had BBQs
30. Oh yeah – finished school, went to our graduation banquet, had a graduation party, went to a graduation party, and graduated!

My mind is an odd amalgam of creative and compulsive – artistic and anal.  It means I set up all sorts of organization systems that others find a bit OTT (Over The Top) but I find very satisfying.

My attic – file cards denote the sections o’ stuff:

Don’t you wish your box ‘o cords was this organized?  I think this was a structured procrastination project from my second quarter finals week:

What do you do with your miscellaneous AC adapters?  I end up keeping mine until I can’t figure out what they belong to and even then I keep them in their own Misc Adapters bag:

Can I tell you how happy I was when I saw this in Bed, Bath and Beyond?  I LOVE IT:

This makes me really happy too.  It’s a combination of two things I really like – organization and abundance:

My instrument cords still need some work but they’re better than they used to be:

Aren’t you glad I am spending my Staycation doing useful things like writing this blog entry??? 

I love Carson – he has this great new show that’s way better than “Queer Eye” called “How to Look Good Naked”.  It’s obviously very funny but also very powerful – heck even Oprah had him on recently to talk about it and the powerful body issues he addresses.

He takes one woman per episode and teaches her to love her body as it is and have a more realistic conception of it - and then he dolls her all up and convinces her to pose nude for a photo shoot.  It’s a feel-good show that really makes you think about the distorted way many women see themselves.  There’s a great segment where he has the woman find her place in a lineup of large women who are arranged by something like thigh size and they invariably overestimate their size by many inches.  Then he shows three women on video in different outfits with their faces blurred and - oh just watch it yourself:

LOVE IT.

After this past week crammed full of finals, our team Capstone Presentation, a marathon Graduation Banquet/Bar night, out of town family arriving, sight-seeing and adventuring, parties and celebratory dinners and finally Graduation, I am so exhausted I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t booked another week of Staycation.

I didn’t coin the term – I read about “The Joy of the Staycation” first in the Wall Street Journal which described a, “Fodor’s-free holiday without luggage, hotels, airplanes or foreign currency…basking in the comforts of home and, just outside, a city we typically don’t have much time to explore.” 

Then ABC News picked up the story, publishing useful “Tips for Planning a Great ‘Staycation’”  which include:

Schedule start and end dates. Just as you would with a vacation, schedule a beginning and ending for your staycation to make it feel like an official vacation. Otherwise, it runs the risk of feeling like just another string of nights in front of the tube.

Pack that time with activities. Plan a daily activity, and make sure something takes you out of the house — for fun — every day.

Declare a "choratorium." That means no chores! Don't make the bed, vacuum, clean out the closets, pull weeds — nothing. You're on vacation!

Take staycation photos or videos, just as you would if you went away from home for your vacation.

I can’t say that I’ll refrain from making my bed ;) but I am following the spirit of these rules next week.  No big homeowner-type projects like painting my living room or cleaning out the garage – just fun things like going to the zoo, taking the dogs on hikes, and getting that overdue pedicure.  And NO WORK EMAIL!

This is the kind of relaxation some people wait all year for and never get!  Now if only the weather would cooperate…

One of the perks of going to UW’s MBA program was that students received a free subscription to the Wall Street Journal.  At first, this was really cool and we loved being able to understand more and more of the content but after our coursework really kicked in (oh, about the second week) we rarely found the time to page through the hard copy and the newspapers became a daily nuisance, littering our driveway and creating periodic recycling projects.  Not that I didn’t read it – I receive the WSJ in my email inbox every day, as well as their technology news.  But the hard copies – we won’t miss them.

And so goes the printed periodical…

As a frustrated GTD devote and procrastinator, I absolutely love this essay and think about it a lot:

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact…

Structured Procrastination

Case in point?  This very blog entry.  I have three more days of work before I’m off for 2 weeks of Staycation and I have 2 finals and a Capstone presentation all due by Saturday.  So I’m finally installing that dimmer switch in my dining room, figuring out the intricacies of my sprinkler system, putting the final Christmas decorations in the attic, installing the front license plate on my new Miata, taking my Pathfinder for an oil change, and blogging a lot of things that have been on my “To blog” list for months, and in this case, even years.  The beauty of all of this is that I don’t feel bad because that’s just how my brain works – I needed to do those things anyway and I know I’ll do the things at the top of the list once they become #2.  It’s a neat Jedi mind trick!

I heart the Internet!  Wow - he really sounds like the original singer!

File this one under Dreams Do Come True: Tommy DeCarlo, unknown singer from Charlotte, North Carolina, just joined his favorite group, Boston, and he has MySpace to thank for it.

DeCarlo, 43, who up until recently was working as a credit manager at his local Home Depot, put MP3's of himself singing Boston songs in tribute to original lead singer Brad Delp, who committed suicide last year, on his MySpace page...

Boston find new lead singer - on MySpace | musicradar.com

People keep asking me where I got my display pic - it's from Passive Aggressive Notes.com, a delightfully disturbing distraction (some NSFW).

You designer geeks will appreciate this Clip art catastrophe and check out the Facebook feed hate.