I'm Baaaack

Sometime ago, I announced my intention to blog once a week. Crap happened, but I'm back. And this time I have an iPad.

My friends and family will know that last year, I asked for an iPad for my birthday, and he gave me a divorce instead. Or, as Mom says, "Instead, he gave you something really wonderful." This year, with my student loan, I got my own iPad. Even better: I was patient and pre-ordered an iPad2.

(For concerned tax payers out there, this was not a frivolous use of my student loan. I desperately needed a new laptop for school. I wanted an iPad. Therefore, my iPad is my new laptop for school. Totally within the guidelines of responsible student loan spending.)

I love my iPad. I have used it for schoolwork. I'm outside with it in the late mornings (after vineyard work) when I write and the evenings when I don't, so it's filled with video of my constant companions: Moon, Baba Wawa, Penny and the Booman. I've used it to edit and post some of those videos on YouTube. I am using it to write one of my novels, which happens to be set on a ranch, so the setting where I set myself and my iPad in the morning is conducive to the creative process.

We're all out here right now in the shade of a 150 year-old oak tree:

My Outdoor Office

One of my favorite aps is 2Do. It's a handy to-do list that can be used to set up repeating actions on certain days. It comes with pretty colored category tabs, fun buttons and prioritizing. I have made the priorities my own though, and so they are not a matter of priority at all. High priority is what I use for one-time things that need doing. Medium is for weekly chores that automatically pop up on their day of the week. Low is for monthly chores. None is for the daily stuff like dishes and litterboxes. (If I could figure out how, I'd change the titles from "None" to "Daily," etc., but that's not a high enough priority for me to take the time to figure it out.) Starred items are tricky little boogers. They never go away. You can touch the box on the screen to indicate it's done, and the line gets drawn, but then it stays there. I like things to disappear from the Today tab. So I only used the star for writing. Weekdays are for the novels (I'm writing two at the moment--it was five, but I've narrowed it down to two--one on the iPad, and one on my office computer in the afternoons.)  And as of yesterday, the weekends are for blogging.  As soon as I push "Publish Post," I get to check it off my 2Do list.

And even though this one has been mostly about nothing, I do have a lot on my mind. It has been quite a year for me, and I have a bunch of topics coming soon, like "Being Catty" and "Stop Telling Me to Build My Barn" and "Oops! I Inhaled. A Lot."  And of course, there are Penny stories and Booman tales, along with the escapades of my border collie, Moon, and my lamb, Baba Wawa.

I had some folks tell me recently that they missed my stories on the Bengals-L Yahoo list. I'm still kind of there, but mostly you'll find me on FaceBook or right here. Uncensored.