This morning I had a pretty epic “Doh!” moment. I contacted my domain name registrar and very good friend Nancy over at Move2HigherGround about renewing the domains and certain email options. She casually reminded me about the email I have through her that I’ve always checked through OE, and the thought occurred to me that I hadn’t logged into the webmail in forever so I couldn’t remember what it even looked like. Imagine my chagrin when I found it to be strikingly similar to OE and NOTHING like Gmail (which I am pretty torqued with after fighting with it for two days straight, but I’m getting there).

So after going in and setting up mail import on my Roadrunner email and switching my Yahoo groups over, I’m calming down and appreciating Gmail for what it is and not mad about what it isn’t. I spent all evening yesterday forwarding emails to my Gmail, so at least now there is quite a bit backed up someplace other than my hard drive.

I can’t believe all this time the best option was right here under my nose. I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson in that.

I’ve often heard that old habits die hard. It’s funny how hard it can be to break (or even change) the most mundane of habits. Nothing like smoking, or drinking, or drugs, or overeating, or even giving up chocolate or Pepsi. I’m talking about something seriously silly: changing email programs.

I’ve been using Outlook Express for probably a good 12 years. Very close to as long as I’ve been using a personal computer, which was a gigantic Acer Aspire in hunter green, but anyway. OE is my buddy. It’s been there for me through more ups and downs than I will ever remember, and when my computer totally crashed six years ago and I lost everything (including all the emails stored in OE) I cried for two days. Dumb, I know, but there was a lot of stuff there: not just personal correspondence but also a lot of writing. But I got over it, replaced the hard drive, and reloaded all my favorite programs–specifically OE.

Now in 12 years, you get pretty used to the way a program runs. I chuckled one day because I rearranged my buttons at the top once and it took me a week to stop pushing the wrong button for “Delete”. My hand just seemed to involuntarily go to that spot. Ditto for “Send/Receive”. I didn’t do a lot of rearranging for that reason.

My current desktop computer is dearly loved. Steve had it custom built for me for Valentine’s Day in 2004, so it’s a bit of a dinosaur. So old, in fact, that I anticipate having to replace it soon. I’ve already added this and upgraded that, to the point where soon it will be the CPU going bye-bye and it will be a matter of either getting a whole new system or trying to merge several things in with another CPU and whatever else I have to do. We’ll figure all that out at some point, but how this all relates to this post is that unfortunately OE is becoming obsolete because the newer operating systems don’t work with OE or have an OE counterpart. I run Win7 on my laptop, which means no access to my email that is locked up in a computer program on this desktop that is on its last legs and even if it wasn’t is still a different computer.

I’ve been trying to find a way to export all of my existing emails from OE to a web-based email program so they would be stored online and not on my hard drive in the OE program. I did back the email files up on a tertiary hard drive so that I can import them should that avenue ever be discovered. So realistically, the only thing left to do is to clean out OE, delete everything that isn’t essential to keep, forward all the essentials to my Gmail, and wean myself off of OE altogether.

I started the weaning process yesterday. I’m doing so well I almost hate to go back into it to do the clean-out, to “smell that smoke”, so to speak, but it has to be done and I may as well do it before the familiarity is too far gone.

I was thinking early this morning about habits. Not bad ones, just patterns we follow in our daily lives without really giving it much thought. Routines.

I routinely wake up in the morning, often just before Steve’s alarm goes off. When he gets up, I remain half-awake until he kisses me goodbye. I listen, still half asleep, as he gathers his phone, wallet, keys, and badge, and then turns on the TV to watch it until Jeff arrives to pick him up. Then I hear the TV go off, then the front door close, then the key locking the deadbolt, then the car pulling away. I usually go back to sleep until around 8:30am, then I get up, use the restroom, then take my phone and book(s) off the night stand and go into the office and put them on my desk. I turn my desktop PC on–first the fan, then the computer, then the monitor–then get a drink, then hit return when the sign-on screen pops up, then hang out for a minute while the computer finishes booting up. I open my email program and hit Send/Receive, then open Firefox and check my Facebook.

I spend the morning alternating between writing, housework, laundry, homeschooling, emailing, checking Facebook, reading blogs, and updating my Google sticky-note. At some point in the morning, I start the bread dough (usually Ciabatta). As soon as Matt unloads the dishwasher I reload it with whatever dishes are sitting in the sink or on the counter. Usually the kids and I work together making lunch, after which I bake bread and continue with more of the morning routine until my two after-school care kids arrive. They are usually here for a couple of hours and go home at around the same time Steve gets home from work. Then it’s usually dinner, getting Rosie to and/or from dance, sometimes getting Matt from Grace home or to Grace to go home with Trevor so he can go to work.

Usually Steve is on his laptop in the living room alternately watching TV, I’m on my computer in the office, Rosie is watching TV or on her computer in her room, and Matt is watching a movie or playing XBox in his room. In the midst of all that, we are talking to one another about something we’re reading or seeing or doing, often getting into interesting political or theological conversations or getting excited over some cool new vocabulary word (this happens with some frequency, I must admit).

Sometime between 10 and 11pm, Steve heads off to bed. Most of the time I’m not far behind him, and the kids aren’t far behind me. I bring my book(s) back into the bedroom, place them on the night stand, use the restroom, and crawl into bed. Most nights I read for a bit before praying myself to sleep.

Tonight I am writing a bit before prayer and sleep, and I was thinking about maybe altering my routine to include writing on my laptop, considering the way my Muse tends to take a hike the moment I sit down at my desk. There’s something about the different atmosphere in our bedroom that makes writing much easier. Thankfully Steve sleeps through my keyboarding with no problem. I bring my ergonomic keyboard from my desk to type on; if I tried typing on my laptop keyboard I would spend more time backspacing than going forward.

So here I am tonight, reflecting back over the routine of my normal day. I suppose I lead a rather dull existence in the minds of some, but I love my routine, I love my family, and I love my life.

Some days my zest for digging is stronger than other days. By digging, I mean searching, delving, reaching backward, downward, inward for what is there to be worded. I know there is so much there, so many moments of this life to be described and preserved. For what, or whom, I’m not sure. But I feel a need to preserve it, nonetheless.

Sometimes I look back over old writings and think, “Wow. I was so in the groove when I wrote that. Why can’t I be in that groove all the time?” But at the same time I know “the groove” ebbs and flows like most things in life.

I find that digging is easier, more readily on my mind and within my capability, when I am reading Natalie Goldberg or Julia Cameron. And there are others, too. Peter Stillman, F.P. Thomas, Bernard Selling. They all inspire me to push forward, write through beyond the surface, beyond even the first two or three layers that present themselves. Pushing past that seems almost a foreign concept, but I think I’ve gone to that depth before. Probably on one of those occasions that produced the writing I look back upon and marvel at “the groove”.

Just changing the look of things a wee bit. I’m not one to like having things look the same for very long at a time, and I haven’t done a lot of housekeeping here lately, because…well, because I haven’t been spending much time here lately. I do a lot of blogging at Blogger, mostly because it’s so easy to have several thematic blogs all linked together with a spiffy dashboard.

I’ve considered using a template here, but I’m not sure how much I would like it and how much of my custom module and links stuff would carry over. Had a bit of trouble with that the last time I tried using one, so I’ve never looked further into it. Might have to check it out again just to see.

Update
Obviously I managed to switch to a theme. Some of my module content didn’t migrate, which is why I copied down all the HTML and saved it elsewhere. Onward!

Instead of doing “Resolutions” this year, I had it firmly (and I daresay divinely) impressed upon me that this year I actually have a theme, and it’s Simple. No, that’s the theme.

Simplify.

I’ve been working on everything that entails, and I’ve come up with a list of areas this extends to, such as pruning “stuff”, and updating social network friend lists, and reassessing friendships and other relationships to determine which ones are worth the work and which ones are sucking the life out of me. It’s about making my entire life simpler so that I can manage it better and have more time for creative endeavors, yes, but more importantly more time to think.

I’ve just gone ashore a lot lately. This is my first long-time custom blog, and I will always cherish it. In fact, I may cherish it a little bit too much since I’ve been reticent to link it in open, public places because it contains so much of my history over the past nearly 8 years. I know, why have a blog if I’m going to hide it. So yeah, I will be linking it more.

Just for the record, I’m also blogging in these places:
Learning Every Minute
The Deep Blue Sea
Blue Ocean Dreamer
Sea Blue Mama

My recently created blogs tend to be thematic, whereas this one is all over the map (kind of like me). I’m not sure I can explain the desire to have so many different blogs, other than to say I love the variety and the different “feel” of each one. I never said I was easy to understand.