Day 558

On Sundays I try to attack the big pile of unopened mail and useless paper that still clutters my office. Once again, I managed to fill one of those big black plastic trash bags without the room looking any tidier at all. I really need to look at my mail more often. When the mail arrives each day, I quickly scan for bills and checks and then leave the rest unopened for months at a time. The only thing I hate worse than getting mountains of junk mail each month is receiving important mail in envelopes that look exactly like there's junk inside. Every month or so, I need to look through all the junk, just to make sure there's not a past due bill tucked in between all the advertising messages.

I sort the paper into different piles. There's stuff I don't understand, but save anyway because maybe I will understand it sometime on the future. Most of this paper is from my financial advisor. There are bank and brokerage statements that I put in a big ring binder. There are lots of expired coupons that go straight in the trash. There are handwritten notes that I make when I am on the phone with clients. Most of these make no sense to me within a week after I write them, so they go in the trash too. I always find a few surprising things that I wish I'd noticed earlier. Today I found two new credit cards that I still needed to activate and a letter from a bank saying that an account had gone dormant because I hadn't used it in a year and a half. There was also a galley proof of my Who's Who in America bio that I should have approved months ago and a discount offer from Facebook offering me from $25 to $500 if I would try running a Facebook ad for my company.

When I gave up on the pile of useless paper, I tried printing some old poster files on my new printer. Last week I told one of my clients that I would reprint some of their old posters that I produced five years ago. I thought this would be easy, but of course it isn't easy at all. I found the old files in Quark Express easy enough, but when I clicked the print button, a dialog box appeared that said media assets were missing and that I needed to relink them. Damn. Since I switched from my old computer with four hard drives to this new computer with a single humongous drive, all my photo and font files are in a different location. After manually re-linking a few files, I realized that I didn't even have some of the old photos anymore. Maybe I won't be able to reprint these old posters after all.

After last weeks rains, the grass needed mowing again. When I was mowing the front yard, I noticed that the leak in the water main had been fixed. I had been meaning to call the city about this leak for months, but it wasn't a high priority, especially since the leak was on the city side of the meter. I was wondering how the city even knew about this leak, but then Janet told me that the meter reader had probably turned in a report after he opened the lid to the water main and noticed that the meter was buried under a foot of water. At any rate, the grass is easier to mow now without the big patch of wet grass on the downhill side of the water main.

We're going to the dog park earlier on Sunday's now to try and beat the heat. This morning, there was a light breeze and it was actually pleasant outside. The dogs seemed to enjoy the cooler weather too. They both wanted to stay a lot longer than they did last week.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day