Jefflog

I’ve been using a Palm Pilot for over a year to help me manage my day to day activities and have found it to be invaluable. I know Palm Pilots are so yesterday, what with iPhones and Blackberrys and other smartphones on the market, but I don’t have any need for accessing the Internet on my phone and certainly don’t want to pay more than the $100/year I’m currently paying for my phone plan. Also, used Palms can be had for under $50 on Ebay. I’m currently using a Tungsten T from 2001 that I bought for $50 last year and it works okay. It’s tech on the cheap.

My Palm Tungsten T displaying the HandyShopper application

Besides the usual calendar, address book, and to-do lists, which are great for organizing my schedule, I’ve found two other programs that really help me with my tasks:

1. HandyShopper works great as a shopping list that I can use again and again. Items are organized by store, and once added the entry stays around in the database making it easy to re-add it later by searching by the first couple of characters. Anytime I need to buy something or realize I’m running low on it, I whip out my Tungsten, make a few scribbles, and put it back in my pocket. In the store, I check off the items as I add them to my shopping cart. Very Handy indeed.

2. ReDo adds items to my To-Do on a schedule that I determine. Among other things, I use it to add my usual household cleaning tasks to my To-Do list, such as vacuuming the carpets or changing the sheets. The deadline date for each task is also quite flexible, so I can specify that certain tasks are due within a day of being added and others are just due sometime in the next week. It’s really helped me keep on top of what needs to be done, and gives me the satisfaction of crossing things off my list after completing them.

   Unfortunately, the website that used to host it is gone, and my attempts to reach the developer have been for naught. Among other things, it means I can’t pay the $10 shareware fee, and get a monthly reminder to register that I cannot get rid of. If you need a copy, your best bet is to look at the Internet Archive copy of the original page.

So far, I’ve been able to keep up with my To-Do list tasks because Hong is still on maternity leave from the office, but I have no doubt that I’ll have to scale back once she goes back to work in March. There’s no way the floors are going to get vacuumed once a week while I have to manage three small children.

Addendum: In case you’re thinking about buying a used Palm at this point, I would advise you to stay away from the Tungsten T model. It has a nasty bug where, after time, the pen’s register will drift away from where you actually pressed. I have to constantly re-calibrate mine, sometimes each time I turn it on. This only takes me a few seconds, but it’s enough of a hassle to warn people to avoid this particular model. As far as I know, the Tungsten T2 and T3 do not have this problem.

Today in Indiana we experienced the infrequent combination of 1) enough snow to have fun in, 2) temperatures that weren’t too cold to be outside for, and 3) neither Maggie, Oliver, or myself were sick. I took this as a sign that I should put off my chores for the moment and go out and play!

They enjoyed making snow castles with their shovel and pail. Meanwhile, I didn’t shirk all of my chores…I used some of my time to shovel some of the snow off the driveway.

After it was over, it was warm chocolate milk for everyone!

Whenever I’m getting ready to complete an online purchase and I see one of those “promotional code” fields, I always head over to Retail Me Not to see if they can give me any that work. More often than not, I can find one that works. Free Shipping is a common promotion, as are flat or percentage discounts of 5%, 10%, or even 20% or more. I’ve easily saved a couple of hundred dollars from these codes through the years.

I remember with our first two children, I’d be reading a baby care book to come across the helpful fact that

Newborn babies typically get between 16-20 hours of sleep a day.

I’d scoff at this because my babies weren’t getting anywhere near that amount of sleep. My selective memory remembers they were only getting 12 hours of sleep a day. It was probably actually more than that, but I quite remember that it was less than what “the books” were telling me.

Naturally, I was fully prepared to accept the inevitable with Sophie. Given that, it’s perhaps amazing that she was brought into this world in the first place. What could we have been thinking? But apparently God has smiled upon us and granted us a child that knows how to sleep. She’s definitely closer to the 20-hour-a-day mark, and can sleep through anything, including two other kids who may be squealing or fighting nearby.

Sophie is already on a regular sleeping schedule at night, waking up once around 2am and again around 6am for feedings. She’s calm the whole time, and can be coaxed back to sleep with a little bit of rocking and cuddling. After dealing with colicky Oliver and his hour-long crying fits at night, Sophie has been simply amazing. She’s such an easy baby.

We used to justify our kids’ wakefulness as a testament to their alertness and intelligence. Depending on how smart Sophie turns out, we may have to change our reasoning to simply say our first two kids were just unusually difficult.