We’ve arrived at Momentum! My dad drove the kids and I drove our cargo van the whole way here. I think we’re all pretty worn out from the drive. It’s looking to be a great week, and we’re all excited to be here!

Zues, Josh and I had a little party this evening. Since conference hasn’t officially started, there are technically no rules .

Not many people think the first day of a new season is worthy of celebration. So the earth hits a certain point in its orbit around the sun, and the weather changes a little. Big deal.

Italian ice lovers think it’s a big deal. For 16 years, Rita’s Ice has been serving up free cups of its delicious treat on the first day of Spring. Any flavor you want. All day long.

I remember the first year I tried Rita’s on the first day of Spring. It was the first time I’d ever tried the stuff, and what a better way to sample than get a free cup on a warm sunny day. Now I go every year, and this year I shivered in the wind 15 minutes for a frozen cup of Birthday Cake-flavored ice. Yeah, it’s that good.

What I admire about Rita’s is their willingness to give. Sure, it’s a way to attract new customers (it worked on me), but they have to be losing money on this thing. But the Rita’s giveaway accomplishes more than just boosting future sales. It bonds people together. Groups of people come out of the woodwork just to get a free ice, no matter how warm or cold it is that day. You’re in line for 15 minutes or more, and everyone is having a good time because they’re getting a free treat. People mingle, and aren’t afraid to joke around with others they’ve never seen before.

What is so striking about this event is that to me it seems so natural. Spring is welcomed by chirping birds, grass starting to turn green, leaves budding, animals scurrying around, and now by humans eating flavored ice. It just fits.

Way to go, Rita’s. Greeting the warm weather with 10 million ounces of ice. Brilliant!

I haven’t been consistently making entries everyday because my grandmother passed away. She lived in western Pennsylvania in the small town of Martinsburg. My grandfather passed away 10 years earlier of a sudden and completely unexpected heart attack.

Grandma had open heart surgery two weeks ago on a Monday, and showed signs of a speedy recovery. But as the week progressed her health began to decline until that Friday when she had a stroke. Doctors spent the whole next week trying to save her, but her organs continued to shut down. Finally, they carried out her living will and took her off of life support on Saturday.

As if the viewing and funeral aren’t hard enough, we had a little trouble with our accommodations for the night in between. We were supposed to stay at my uncle’s cabin, but we couldn’t get up the steep drive due to ice. We tried numerous times, and even the tire-chains didn’t help. Finally we resorted to finding a hotel, so we drove an hour to the closest one that Google knew about. They were booked, and so were three others that we tried.

We spent about three hours looking for a place to stay, and my patience was wearing thin, but I’m now cozied up in a Ramada double bed with my MacBook. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for Mary and Joseph to end their hotel search in a barn.

People in my part of the country do not know how to drive in snow. Snow is coming down steadily, the roads are slick, and I have an idiot tailgating me. I begin to brake on a hill, and hesitate to look in my mirror because I know he’s probably spinning. Sure enough, he is slamming on his brakes and going sideways. No problem, except for the Yukon behind him currently rolling over. That’s right, the nutcase caused another car to stop suddenly, slide up into the bank, and roll over on its side.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a car roll over, let alone a big old GMC Yukon, but it’s a very amusing sight (especially when no one gets hurt). It really puts things into perspective. These vehicles we travel in each day are just boxes to get us around the planet. You can have a $2000 junker box or a $100,000 sporty box, but the snow can roll either one.

Strange title, I know. If I were to guess, most people do not think of me as a very thoughtful person. This is an example of the psychological phenomenon that people tend to make internal attributions about others.

However, the problem is not that I am a selfish, uncaring person, it is rather that I am a forgetful one. It often occurs to me that I should write someone a note, or leave a comment on so-and-so’s blog, or write a birthday card to an old buddy. After having the thought and deciding to do it, it somehow manages to check itself off my mental to-do list so that I consider it done.

Try planning to be thoughtful. If you carry a Moleskine with you, or even index cards, you can use them to write these things down. When you think of a thoughtful deed that you can do for someone, write it down. Don’t spend so much time thinking about how nice it would be, and how they would appreciate it so much, just write it down. Chances are these thoughtful ideas won’t occur at a time when you are able to do them. If write them down, you can put them out of your head. Later, when you have time, you can sit down and pull out your list of thoughtful things to do for people, and actually carry them through.  If you follow this technique and you have nothing to write down, then you can rest assured that you are probably not a thoughtful person .

I do not like to clean. I like things clean, but I really don’t enjoy taking time out of my schedule to work on making something clean. Lately I have been trying to train myself that leaning is not a waste of time, it is a fresh start toward a more organized life.
Here are some tips that I personally discovered to be helpful to someone who thinks cleaning is… well, hard:

1. Shut your dang laptop. ‘Nuf said.
2. One of the fundamental parts of cleaning is getting rid of some junk that you don’t use anymore. But if you are a sentimental pack-rat like me, you may clean your entire room and end up with only 1 nice little cubic foot of uncompressed garbage. Instead of asking yourself, “can I get rid of this?”, instead ask yourself “can I do without this?” I did just that and found myself filling a garbage bag up fast. It caused me to get rid of things that I was saving just in case I needed them (like my large plastic bag collection).
3. Another idea is surrounding yourself with some new things (as in “not used”, not “additional”). We all like new things better than old things. If you have a bunch of old blank notebooks lying around (I’m referring to the ones that you made blank by tearing the 5 used pages out of the front), give them to a friend or someone else who could use them, and only save the ones that have all 70 pages in and are completely new. Open a fresh pack of paper clips instead of using the old multicolored ones you’ve been reusing since kindergarten. It is OK to conserve, but it is also OK to treat yourself to some new things once and a while.
4. Something else that helps me is rearranging an item of furniture. This isn’t always an option, but moving a large piece of furniture to a new location gives me a sense of making a fresh start. This has psychological affect on my spirit and makes me more interested in cleaning.

Depending on what type of person you are, this post might be nothing more than a large chunk of obviousness. That is fine, just go flex your cleaning skills while us A.D.D. types talk over coffee and sympathize with each other about our cleaning woes.

I am extremely bad at organization. There are a number of items in my life that eternally need addressing, such as filling out forms, taking care of responsibilities, and even cleaning my room. You know, important stuff like that.

I am attempting to come up with a “trusted system” that works for me. I am a relatively unmotivated person. I listen to the 43 Folders podcast and sometimes I also read some of the blog entries on the site. I find Merlin Mann to spark my interest in organization. Perhaps this is for the reason that he has the ability to accurately capture my personal struggles with organization, motivation, and procrastination.

The best reflection I have had of myself from Merlin is in his podcast episode The Perfect Apostrophe. Basically when I have a task to do, I spend so much time preparing to prepare to begin the project that I burn out early with a parting statement of “I’m screwed”. Then, if the project is self-assigned, it immediately gets put on a back burner for a few months.

If it is something for school, I will procrastinate till the last possible minute, and then fly things into gear, staying up until 4am the night before. The problem with this is, I am not motivated to change, because I usually get fairly high letter grades on assignments completed in this manner.

Anyway, I will make posts about aspects of this “trusted system” that I am devising, and perhaps some other theories of organization for the unorganized.