I have to thank you all so much for generously sharing recipes and thoughts with me.
One of my friends said I clearly struck a chord, and this seems to be true. I got a tremendous inpouring (spell check is telling me this isn't a word, but I still like it) of comments here and on FB, and emails with recipes and laments!
Here is what I've learned: many of us are in the same boat. Some of you have been feeling the same shame. I love not feeling alone, and so do you.
Also, you have terrific and concrete ideas! I now have so many recipes and suggestions for books, approaches, and classes. I need to weed through them all. I didn't expect this wealth.
We are going to improve our dinner situation. I will let you know how this goes. I'm going to have to figure out how to organize them first.
And on this note...
Recently Nick hooked up a hard drive containing the contents of my long-dead laptop and loaded them on my so-not-new laptop. I kept meaning to but one thing and another got in the way. And then at some point I really wanted those old pictures and music and such. So he pulled it out and transferred files.
I looked for some things that I knew I had before but cannot find now and asked if he got it all. He said,"I'm not sure. Your filing system was...unclear."
"Oh. That might be because I don't file anything."
"I didn't want to suggest that and get you all defensive."
I'm a terrible filer. With physical files, it's more that it's just tedious. I do it, but only when I have to. But that's a matter of cramming a bunch of papers that go together in the same folder.
On the computer, it draws on some kind of skill that is not my strength. I think it's sort of like when I took probability and statistics and letters stood for whole calculations and I could never figure out the likelihood of pulling a green marble out of a deck of cards perched on a coin flip. Plus I couldn't bear never understanding what was going on and I was too depressed to drop the class so instead I just stopped going and spent my time eating chocolate peanuts.
It was a grand success, in case you're wondering.
It also harkens back to when I sucked at making outlines, because I couldn't decide if my A, B, and C topics were parallel, or if one should go under the other, and then making things parallel under them was just ugh. Now I make outlines with dots and lines and the parallelity doesn't matter.
Me, I could happily have everything spread out on my desktop. Except, you know, that you can't.
I'm more afraid of the idea of storing everything on one's desktop than ALL the animals you listed in the last post. I'm organized and I struggle with organizing digital information, except at work or with photography - so you are not alone (but totally thrive on structure and LOVED my stat class. I didn't have access to those crack chocolate peanuts in NC though).
ReplyDeleteI'd recommend organizing things chronologically - it's straightforward and you can usually remember the year something happened at least. It's a start. You could start now and not worry about the past because that could be overwhelming too. Good luck! I'd come over and help you (or do it for you) if I lived closer!
Heather, I am sorry. I knew that if you read this it would turn your data-organizing stomach! :) Thank you for the suggestion! If you lived here I would say please please please organize my entire life pleaseandthankyou!
DeletePINTEREST!! I use it for the sole purpose of maintaining recipes. So awesome. I started a general "healthy eating" board and then it got so big I broke it out into categories, salads, soups, casseroles, you get the point. It's great because you can move things around easily and add notes (like, say you try a recipe and thought it needed more salt, it's super easy to edit your pin so you don't forget next time). And it's very intuitive, which is important to me since my patience for learning new tech skills is...limited.
ReplyDeleteIn summary: Pinterest FTW. It really does allow you to put everything into one place where you can see it all easily...