When we moved at the beginning of the year, we had decided not to put the girls into daycare for the time being. Marcy was not going to be working and we were looking for ways to keep our spending down. As a result we ended up looking for enrichment activities for Bella and found Curiosity Zone. Parents of young kids know it can be difficult to find good activities for children under the age of 5, so their Little Lab program was exactly what we needed. The night when she goes to her “science class,” as she calls it, has quickly become her favorite day of the week. So much so that we immediately signed her up for the entire year after her first day. She learned about geologists, engineers, astronauts, and other professions during the last session, and this time around it’s backyard science, where they’re learning about backyard animals, weather, and other fun things.

I can’t possibly overstate how proud it makes me feel that Bella loves science so much, and I do everything I can to encourage that. We have color crystal kits and prisms for her to play with at home. While she’s tending more towards her dolls lately, blocks and Tinkertoys and LEGO have always been the favorites. I take her to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center to look at the planes, and her favorite exhibits are the space artifacts. I selfishly don’t want my mother to ever move from the condo she has in Boston because it’s right next to the Boston Children’s Museum. Bella’s imagination and creativity is astounding, and when you combine that with wanting to learn how things work it’s going to take her far.

Partly because of her interest in the space displays at the museum, and partly because I have never been able to see it, we wanted to plan a trip this fall to go see one of the final Space Shuttle launches. Who knows when there will be a replacement program, and there’s something about seeing the Shuttle launch, especially knowing there are people in it, that is more amazing than a rocket launch. The STS-133 (Discovery) launch is now scheduled for November 1st, the day after our planned Walt Disney World trip ends. That, much to my boss’s chagrin, has turned our trip into a 2 week vacation to Florida. We are renting a condo right on the Indian River in Titusville, directly across from the Kennedy Space Center, for the month of November. That way we have somewhere to watch from even if the launch slips by a few days (or a few weeks). Of course, we’ll spend plenty of time at KSC doing tours and seeing all the exhibits as well!

I’m also getting a little treat just for me. Several of the high energy physics labs, including CERN and Fermilab are hosting photowalks for amateur photographers on August 7th. I was able to get into the limited group going to Fermilab (only about 50 people per site are allowed). We’ll get to see one of the accelerator tunnels, the antimatter factory, and a few other sites. I just hope I’ll be able to get some good pictures, since I’m only just picking up the hobby again after a long hiatus. The last time I took any serious pictures was in college.

For those not familiar, Getting Things Done (aka GTD) is a methodology for capturing, defining, organizing, and reviewing every aspect of your life, from where you want to be in 10 years to what you need to pick up at the grocery on the way home.  It’s not tied to a specific tool, and the concepts involved are generally things you already do, just not with enough regularity.  If you want to know more, there are dozens of people out there who can explain GTD better than I can.

This is actually my third time trying to implement GTD. The last two times I lost control of my system and then just stopped trying because I was not doing regular weekly reviews and I was disregarding the “hard edges” of my calendar by trying to plan out when I was going to do things, rather than keeping my calendar to the “must do” things for a particular day and working from my context lists. But both times taught me the joy of clarity. Do you have any idea how amazing it is for someone like myself, who works in computers, to be confronted with a completely empty inbox?

It’s very easy to remember when I started working on GTD this time around, because it was two days before I registered this website. Like the previous times, I took a work day and went to Starbucks instead of the office. For the serious brain dump I needed to do, I have to get out of the office where I can be interrupted, and I can’t be at home where I’m distracted. But once I got everything that was on my mind down into the computer, I decided I wanted to start writing. I quickly came up with the site name and several topics that I wanted to write about. Which, of course, created new projects in my GTD system. A very clear example of how the human brain is made for having ideas, not holding them. Once you relieve it of having to hold onto things, it can get back to what it’s good at.

So why did I just take over a month between posts, if I’m so organized and clear? Life, that’s why. The whole reason I started up again is because things were getting out of control. I have a full time job, a full time retail business, a house, and a 3 year old. I got myself together, but June and July threw a few curve balls. I felt like I had to let a few things on my list slide while I dealt with whatever the current crisis was. Everything was still in my system, though, so I was able to look at those things and say “not today.” I actually came up with the topic for this post a month ago, but I wasn’t in the right place to write it until now.

OK, so why write it now? I realized this past week that I’ve caught up on many of my stalled projects at work, simply because I had clarified them and had discrete actions available for each. Meetings that I had been putting off scheduling suddenly got on the calendar because I put an action on my list first to write an agenda for them. When I was in a mood to take care of things that I had been ignoring, I was able to because I was adhering to the GTD concepts and I knew what all the actions that were required were.

It doesn’t stop there. I’m picking back up on projects around the house, and around the business as well. It feels so good to check the actions and projects off my list that I want more of that. Clarity is addictive, and I wonder what else is going to flood in to fill the void when my head is clear.