Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

Staying Focused with a Daily Planner

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I return to my custom daily planner sheets to stay focused, waste less time, make more of my day, and be more productive.

As I’ve aged, I’ve been struggling with productivity. I just can’t seem to do as much in a day as I used to.

The Way Things Were

I remember the height of my writing days. I’d sit down to write a book I was under contract to produce by a certain date. I’d start with an outline or table of contents and I’d sit at my desk for up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, to knock out the book, chapter by chapter. During that time, I didn’t do much of anything else. But when I was done, I’d take a few weeks to goof off and have fun. That’s when I learned to fly helicopters and did some of my best solo trips. And then I’d get back to work on the next book.

I wrote 85 books from 1991 through 2016. That’s an average of about 3 1/2 books per year. I know that one year, I wrote 10.

In the beginning of my writing career, I also did consulting work, led hands-on computer training classes for a few organizations, and wrote articles for various magazines. Near the end of it, I was juggling flights and clients for my helicopter charter and agricultural services company. I also started a bunch of hobbies, some of which held my interest for years.

But these days, I find myself kind of drifting, spending too much time on social media — don’t we all? — and not getting the things done that I need or want to get done.

Return of the Daily Planner

Daily Planner Page
My Daily Planner form has the sections that work best for me.

A few years ago, when I realized I was struggling with focus, I tried a bunch of different daily planner solutions, finally coming up with my own custom daily planner sheets to meet my needs. I printed a bunch of planner pages up, put them in a looseleaf binder on my kitchen countertop, and started each day by planning it out.

The planner pages have several sections:

  • Heading. This is simple: just the date and day of the week. What’s odd is that since going freelance in 1990, I haven’t had “weekends” the way other people do. I always worked when there was work to do and did personal things or goofed off when there wasn’t. The only time weekends meant anything after 1990 was when I was married to a man chained to a M-F, 9-5 business schedule. My weekends were his weekends. Fortunately, I have’t had to deal with that for a long time. But I still specify what day of the week it is because there are certain things I can’t do on weekends, like make calls to certain businesses.
  • Priorities for Today. This is three lines with check boxes for the things I think are very important to get done that day. I usually have at least one item I put in this section.
  • To-Do List. This is 17 lines with check boxes for other things I want to get done that day. I try to fill this up with specific achievable tasks in no particular order. And yes, sometimes I put very easy things on the list; this ensures I check something off that day.
  • For Tomorrow. This is four lines with check boxes for things I don’t necessarily want to do that day but should get done the next day or soon.
  • Schedule. This is a box with half-hour time slots starting at 5 AM and ending at 8:30 PM. I use this area two ways:
    • Appointment schedule. If I have a known appointment or task that need to be done at a certain time, I block it in, along with any travel time. This can be telephone or video calls, doctor or vet appointments, or lunch dates. Anything that I have to do at a specific time.
    • Time Use. I fill in the space around any appointments with how I’ve actually spent that time as the day goes on. For example, it’ll take me about an hour to write this blog post so that’ll be plugged in at the 7:30 to 8:30 slot: “Blog about planner.” This makes me conscious of how I spend my time and how I waste it.
  • Health. The health section lets me log water intake — I don’t get thirsty so I don’t drink and am always dehydrated; this reminds me to drink — and various exercise and diet stats from my watch and, when I’m dieting, my calorie counter app. I’ll admit that I don’t use this section as much as I should, but I keep it there in case I want to start using it again.

Things are different now. I’m traveling, currently along the east coast, on my boat. There is no spacious kitchen counter where I can leave my Daily Planner pages. But I have some pages with me and the original PDF file to print from. I pulled a page out to consider it and wound up handing it off to Jason while he was on board. He was enthusiastic about it. That got me thinking that maybe I should start using it again, too.

So I did.

Yesterday was the first day in a long time. I listed my things to do and recorded how I spent my time. I found that it kept me very focused and made me more productive. How? Well when I finished doing some things and found myself idle, I’d say to myself “What next?” instead of reaching for my phone or tablet and wasting a bunch of time online. I’d look through the uncompleted tasks, pick one I felt ready to do, and get it started.

I repeated this throughout the day. The result: I finished nine out of 12 list items (but unfortunately, not the priority item) and made progress on a tenth item that could not be finished until Monday. Would I have gotten as much done if I didn’t use the Planner yesterday? I don’t think so.

Today, I planned another day. That Priority item is back and I’ll do it when I finish this. (This blog post, by the way, is not on the planner — although it should have been; I really needed a new blog post. I’ll add it to my schedule but not to the To Do list so I can check it off. That’s cheating.) Throughout the day, I might add a few more items; there are currently a total of 13.

And to further encourage me to stick with it, I’ve ordered a looseleaf notebook with a clipboard front cover so I can leave the list where I’ll see it, whether I’m on the boat or back at home.

Planning on My Mind

Planning is really on my mind lately. I’m writing a multi-part series for my Great Loop blog about cruise planning and have created some custom planning pages for that, too.

Although I have all kinds of planning tools on my laptop, tablet, and phone, I find that pen and paper are the best tools for me. As Jason pointed out this morning, mobile devices are distracting. He’s right! I saw his text about that and replied to it when I reached for my phone to use the calculator. And then I forgot to use the calculator until I got back to this post and realized I needed to do some math. Best to leave the mobile devices on the table or in your pocket.

Any thoughts about this? Share them in the comments.

My History with a 1995 Sea Ray SeaRayder F-16

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In my possession for 12 years before last week’s sale, it played a part in the theater of my crazy divorce.

Jet Boat For Sale
Here’s my little jet boat parked in front of Bob’s house on the corner. He also sold my Yamaha motorcycle for me. Now if only I can get him to take my truck camper…

Last week, I sold my little jet boat.

Or my friend Bob did. He lives on a main road and had a caller within 30 minutes of putting the For Sale sign on the boat where it was parked on the corner at his house. The next day, after a launch and engine run, he had cash in hand and the new owner was driving away.

About the Boat

The boat was 28 years old when I sold it. That is not a typo.

First Look
My friend Pete and the boat’s previous owner open the engine lid for a look inside. It was immaculate.

I bought it in late summer 2011 from the original owner, a couple who lived at Crescent Bar in Quincy, WA. I’m pretty sure my future wasband told me not to buy it — he didn’t like me buying anything anymore, even though I always bought with money I’d earned and not our joint funds.

It was a fun little boat. At the age of 16 years old — when I bought it — it was in amazing condition, having been stored indoors for most of its life. The one season the original owners had left it in the water on a mooring ball at Crescent Bar, the upholstery had taken a beating and they’d replaced it. It looked great. It started right up. It was easy to tow, easy to launch by myself, easy to drive, and easy to get back on the trailer by myself.

Because it was a jet boat, it seemed to steer from somewhere about 1/3 down the boat — instead of from the back. It was a weird sensation, especially at high speed. Virtually no body roll. It would just seemingly slide into a turn.

It had a 120 horsepower jet boat engine which, considering the boat’s diminutive size — it was only about 17 feet long — seems like a lot. But it didn’t have enough power to pull a skier — I was told that by the owner when I bought it. That was fine with me. All I wanted was a way to get out on the water and have some fun. The price of admission — just $1,500 — made it a no-brainer to buy.

Winter 2011/2012

Helicopter and Motorcycle
I had one of my two motorcycles shipped up to Washington because I was spending every summer there and wanted something to get around on other than my wasband’s truck. Here it is with my old helicopter parked at my friend Pete’s winery/orchard. Both of these are gone now; more life subchapters closed.

I couldn’t bring it home with me to where I was still living in Arizona because I had to drag home the fifth wheel I spent my summer working months in. Instead, I made arrangements to have it and my old Yamaha Seca II motorcycle, which I’d had shipped to Washington earlier that year, stored indoors for the winter.

I went home and had a miserable winter with my future wasband, trying to keep our marriage together by living with him during the week in his Phoenix condo and coming home with him on weekends. If anything, living in the cave-like condo he’d bought (for reasons I still don’t understand) made matters worse.

In the spring of 2012, I went back to Washington for my fifth consecutive season of cherry drying. I was growing my business there and had hired another pilot to help me during the busiest part of the season. I was also working on a Mac OS book revision — I was still writing computer books back then — and picking up flying work by taking people to wineries with the helicopter. It was summer 2012 and my flying business was really looking up.

When I wasn’t writing or flying and there wasn’t rain in the forecast, I was able to take my little jet boat out on the river from Crescent Bar and ride my motorcycle. My summer job was looking more and more like a paid summer vacation every year.

Parked Boat
Here’s the boat parked at the Colokum Ridge Golf Course campground, where I started each summer. You can see my old Montana fifth wheel and my wasband’s white Chevy truck in the background.

The Divorce Bullshit Begins

The idiot I was was dumb enough to marry called on my birthday to tell me he wanted a divorce. (Can you believe that shit?) A lot of weird stuff followed and if you look hard enough in this blog under early posts tagged divorce you should find plenty of that.

Meanwhile, I was stuck in Washington for work and I wasn’t sulking around. I was doing what I always did when I was there: hanging out with friends, flying for work and pleasure, writing, and doing fun things like day trips with the boat or my motorcycle or my wasband’s truck, which is what’d used to take that big fifth wheel up to Washington again.

When he didn’t actually file for divorce and swore that there was no other woman, a friend of mine told me that he wasn’t serious about the divorce and was probably just blowing steam. I emailed him to tell him I’d be home in September with the boat so we could use it on Lake Pleasant. But then I found out about the old woman he was already shacking up with and my plans changed.

At the end of cherry season, I stored the boat and the fifth wheel and went home. More weirdness followed. Then the nitty gritty of divorce bullshit. He dragged that out for months, certain for some reason that I was in a hurry to get back to Washington and would give him anything he wanted to finish things up quickly.

For a man who’d lived with me for 29 years, he certainly didn’t know me very well. I had no reason to go back to Washington before cherry season and I only had one home. So other than taking a few trips to visit friends and family members, I just stayed home and packed. I’d already decided that when the divorce dust settled, I’d buy 10 acres of land in Malaga that some friends were selling and build a new home on it.

The boat never crossed my mind, although, in hindsight, it would have been a lot of fun on Lake Pleasant and the Salt River lakes while I waited for him to get a clue.

The Boat as a Divorce Pawn

The boat was included in my list of personal property. Because I had purchased it while we were married, it was technically part of our community property, despite the fact that only my name was on the title. I don’t remember if I listed it for its purchase price of $1500 or something a little lower, perhaps $1200. I was honest about the value — which is more than I can say for the way he tried to undervalue his Mercedes by neglecting to mention its AMG upgrade. Although we tried mediation to split the personal property and other things before our court date in May 2013, the old woman he’d replaced me with — who was apparently managing the divorce for him — told him not to agree to anything. So that’s how the boat wound up in court.

Skinny Me
I lost 45 pounds while I was away in Washington during the summer of 2012. I’m surprissed my future wasband didn’t have a heart attack when he first saw me on my return. I looked and felt like the new woman I was about to become.

And this is where the farce began. I think it was our second day in court. Before things got started, his lawyer told my lawyer that my future wasband wanted the boat and was willing to pay half its value. He offered me $1000 for my share.

Now this was, in no way I knew of, half the boat’s value. The boat, in my mind, wasn’t worth a penny more than I’d paid nearly two years before: $1500. For some reason, he was claiming it was worth $2000.

But I knew what was really going on. They — my future wasband and his “advisor” (or mommy; call her what you will) — thought the boat was worth a lot more. Remember, he’d never actually seen more than photos. They figured that if they lowballed me and I refused, they’d somehow be able to prove it was worth more than I said. (For what purpose at this very late stage in the game, who knows?)

But I knew what the boat was worth: $1500 max. So he was offering me $250 more than half the value.

I’m not a complete idiot. I took the offer.

While all this was going on, my future wasband was squirming in his seat. It was pretty clear to me — after all, I’d lived with him for 29 years, too, and I’d been actually paying attention — that he didn’t want the damn boat. This was a ploy his mommy and lawyer had agreed to play in court as the judge was settling into his seat for the day and I don’t think he was happy about it. When I mentioned that the boat was in Washington and I would not be storing it for him, he started to see the reality of the situation: having to not only pay for a boat he didn’t want, but drive 1200 miles to Quincy, WA to retrieve it and another 1200 miles to bring it home. I relished the thought of him doing that for an 18-year-old boat he’d overpaid for.

So he told his lawyer he didn’t want it and it went back into the property pool.

Oddly enough, when the judge made his decision, he let me keep everything I’d bought over the years, even if I’d bought it since we were married. That included the fifth wheel, a hangar in Page, AZ (which was actually an exchange for like property purchased before we married), and the boat.

So I got to keep the boat and didn’t have to pay him a dime for it.

The Boat in My New Life

Janet Fishing
My friend Janet spent a week with me in late summer 2013. We took the boat out and she did some fishing. A typical trip would be to drive at full throttle up to the nearest dam, kill the engine, and drift back downriver, listening to music, snacking, and talking with whoever had come along for the ride.

When I moved up to Washington “full-time” to reboot my life closer to work, the boat became part of that life. My garage was big enough to store it and although I didn’t use it as much as I wanted to, it was great to be able to just hook it up to my Jeep and drag it down to the Columbia River on a hot summer day with friends. I even dragged it to Arizona behind my truck camper years later, long after that fifth wheel had been sold so I could go boating on the Colorado River, Lake Havasu, and Lake Pleasant.

Boat Dogs
Although I didn’t use the boat as much as I liked when I took it back to Arizona, it was good for a few outings on the Colorado River, Lake Pleasant, and Lake Havasu. Here’s my old dog Penny with Janet’s dog Dually on the bow when we headed out to the Colorado River late one afternoon.

But time marches on. I wanted to do more serious boating. Cruising in something I can live aboard while covering long distances. Like maybe the 6,000 mile Great Loop. After a series of unexpected positive events, I wound up buying the 2019 Ranger Tug R29 CB I named Do It Now. I’ve spent a total of 179 days on board since September 5, 2022 and I’ll be going back for more at the end of this September.

I didn’t need that little jet boat any more. I knew that, despite the fact that I really liked it and how easy it was to just go out on the river for a day of fun. It was taking up space in the garage, space I’d hoped to store other stuff in. Like maybe a trailer for that bigger boat.

Selling the Boat

So after a lot of soul searching, I put it up for sale last week.

I suspected, at this point, that it was worth more than I’d paid. Everything these days is worth more. (My truck camper is worth at least $7K more than I’d paid for it 6 years ago.) So I originally priced it at $2200, hoping to settle on $2,000.

Last Day
Here’s the boat on the last day I owned it. I’d taken it down to the river for one last ride with the neighbors who were interested in buying it. I almost changed my mind — as I almost had on my last motorcycle ride — but stayed firm.

The neighbors who wanted to buy it — well, she did and he didn’t and he won — said it was worth more. So when I dropped it off at Bob’s house where it would get a lot more exposure, I suggested $2500. He thought that was high, but it was worth a try.

It sold in less than 24 hours for the full asking price of $2500. I paid Bob a commission and pocketed $2250.

Did I lie about the boat’s value back in 2013? No. I think inflation and the fact that the 28 year old boat was in mint condition — due to being garaged for its entire life — worked in my favor.

And thus ends another subchapter of my life: my small boating days.

Deleting the Duplicates

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As I try to get my 43,000-photo library under control, I find photos from my life.

R22 with Stagecoach
This isn’t one of the duplicates, but it is one of the oldest photos in my Photo Library. Shot in 2002 with a Canon Powershot 300 camera, it shows my first helicopter, a Robinson R22 Beta II, parked in my hangar. That is an authentic 1800s stagecoach behind it; I got the hangar, in part, because I agreed to store the stagecoach. That same stagecoach is now on display at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, AZ.

I’m in the midst of a big project to downsize my computer setup. For years — heck, since I started computing in 1984 — I’ve always had a desktop computer. When I began writing books about how to use computers in the 1990s, I added a second desktop. And then a third when I started writing books about Windows. After a while, those extra computers turned into more practical (and space saving) laptops. When I started traveling, the Mac laptop went with me. Eventually, I stopped writing about windows and ditched the PC laptop. But that left me with a desktop and laptop Mac. (And an iPad, but that serves an entirely different purpose.)

I’m traveling more and more these days and my current Mac desktop — a loaded 2007 27″ iMac — was giving me a lot of trouble. Slow performance, weird error messages, system lockups. It definitely needed help, but since I mostly used my laptop — a stripped down 2021 13″ MacBook Air — I just didn’t get around to tracking down the problem. The only thing I really used the iMac for was video editing and when I got burned out doing that, I hardly used it at all.

Now, as I plan for an extended journey on my boat, I started to think long and hard about why I actually had a desktop computer. I loved the big screen — and the second 24″ monitor set up beside it — but it certainly would not fit on my boat. Besides, did I need it? Apple had just released a new 15″ MacBook Air with a faster processor and SSD hard disk. After a lot of thought, I realized that a machine like that could probably replace my current laptop and the desktop computer that was giving me so much grief. When I learned that Apple would give me a $500 credit toward the purchase of the new computer if I traded in the old one — which had only cost $1,000 two years before — it was a no-brainer. I took the plunge.

Moving the Files

Unfortunately, the problems with the iMac came to a head as I was getting ready to make the new computer purchase. I’d connected my iPhone to the iMac to manually copy the 3000+ photos I’d shot during my 5 months on the boat from December 2022 through April 2023. For some reason, about half the photos were copied to the iMac and deleted from my phone and I couldn’t get the iMac to take the rest.

Insert long boring story about troubleshooting here. Actually, no. You don’t want to read it any more than I want to write it.

Rosie and Lily
One of the duplicates: my dog Rosie, front and center, while Lily’s attention is elsewhere behind her. This was shot at Roche Harbor in September 2022.

I eventually used Disk Utility to determine that there were directory issues on the iMac’s main hard disk. It would need to be reformatted to be fixed. By that time, of course, Finder had stopped working and I couldn’t do a damn thing on the iMac, let alone open the Photos app to see if the missing pictures were actually there.

I had two backups. One was a Time Machine backup, but I didn’t trust its integrity enough to rely on it for restoring my data. The other was a SuperDuper! backup that basically duplicated the disk. It was a few days old and I couldn’t remember whether I’d made it before or after copying those photos.

Understand that I wasn’t very worried about the rest of the data on the computer. My important documents either live on or are backed up to the Cloud. I mostly use Dropbox for the important stuff, but I had some other stuff floating around on various other clouds that I had free space on. I also had very important stuff backed up to my web server at my ISP.

It was the pictures that concerned me. Judging from what was missing from my phone, it looked as if trip photos from December through at least February were missing. The only place they currently existed was in the Photos app library on that sick iMac hard disk. (If they were there at all.)

I was worried.

Insert more geeky computer-fixing tasks here. No, not really. I’ve already written more about this than I wanted to.

End of long story: I was able to copy all of my Home folder to an external hard disk. So I now had three backups of my data and could move forward to put them on my new MacBook Air, which, by this time had arrived and already received files from my old laptop. That old laptop was already in Apple’s hands.

As I still struggle to understand how the Photos app on Mac OS works with my iPhone to collect photos behind the scenes, I did the simple thing: I copied my 500+ GB (not a typo) Photo Library file from the backup to the new computer’s Photos folder. When the disks stopped whirling, I wound up with a 43,000-photo library on my new computer.

And that entire computer is backed up throughout the day every day to the Cloud. (Yes, I’ll add Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups when I start traveling and have sketchy Internet access.)

Colorado San Juan ConfluenceThis was one of the first duplicates, from 2006. It’s an aerial view of the confluence of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers over Lake Powell. If the water levels get anywhere near this high again by next year, I’ll be putting my boat in the lake for a few months in autumn 2024.

Deleting the Duplicates

Duplicates
Here’s an image from Photos showing some duplicates. I’ve already gotten rid of at least half of them. These photos are from a cruise to Alaska I took back in 2019 on a 70-foot, 90 year old wooden boat.

And that brings me to what I really wanted to write about here: deleting the duplicates. You see, the Photos app has a feature where it’ll go through the database of photos and videos and identify duplicate images. It then displays them side by side and offers a button (that looks like a link) to merge them.

Of course, I didn’t know how it worked at first. When I clicked the sidebar item labeled duplicates, Photos dutifully began looking for duplicates among the 43,00+ images. I waited. Nothing happened. I had chores in town so I left it to do its thing.

When I returned, the computer was sleeping. I woke it up and did some other stuff before I remembered the task I’d given it. I switched to Photos and saw that it had found more than 2,000 duplicates. That’s when I learned that I’d have to go through them one by one to delete them. I settled down with my dinner to start the task.

And that’s when I started seeing my life flash before my eyes.

Well, not really. Not in that dramatic you’re-about-to-die sort of way.

Instead, it was random photos, in chronological order, from my past. It started with aerial shots I’d taken — or maybe my wasband or a client had taken? — from my old helicopter over Lake Powell in 2006 and progressed to various photos shot since then. Some of them were great snapshots of amazing places while others were mundane photos of my dog or a sunset or builders using a forklift to bring huge sheets of sheetrock through the door on my deck into my home under construction. They were snapshots of my life, taking me through the years.

David B
This is the David B, a 70-foot, 90-year-old wooden boat I cruised on, with just 3 other passengers, from Bellingham WA to Ketchikan AK in 2019. I captured this image with my drone.

I don’t know why some photos were duplicated and others weren’t. I do know that there are more duplicates in later years than in earlier years — but then again, there are also more photos from later years. The photos from 2006, for example, would have come from an actual camera. I had a Canon G5 digital camera in those days; my Nikon was a film camera. It wasn’t until my trip to Alaska in 2007 that I finally bought my first DSLR. And even then, those photos would have to be manually added to iPhoto (in those days) on my Mac.

What the hell?

It’s hard to believe that I used to write books about using Mac computers when I barely have a clue about how the “new” Mac OS features work. Truth of the matter is, when I stopped writing about Mac OS, I stopped updating the OS regularly. I became a mere user, and not even one who cared about running the latest and greatest version of the OS. My iMac is still running Maverick; I resisted upgrading to that as long as I could.

What does that mean? It means that there are a lot of Mac OS features that I simply don’t use or understand these days. How Photos and my iPhone work together is a perfect example — they’re obviously doing something together that I don’t know about. I’ve come a long way — mostly down — from knowing how everything works. It’s weird and it bothers me a bit, but in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. I spend far less time in front of a computer than I did for the 20+ years I wrote about them.

And that’s kind of nice.

But nowadays, almost all the photos I take are taken with my iPhone. Why not, right? It has a great camera. I take photos every day — sometimes dozens of them. I suspect that in more recent years my phone started uploading them to iCloud which then somehow put them on my iMac. Or maybe when I got home and was connected to the network and my iMac was turned on, some sort of transfer happened. I don’t know (and yes, that bothers me.) When I manually added them using a cable — yes, I’m old school — I got duplicates.

Anyway, the plan is to remove all the duplicates first and then go through all the photos, delete the ones that are crap, and pull the ones I don’t need off my computer for storage on some sort of archival media. Probably hard disk drives (duplicated, of course) and/or CD-ROM discs. The goal is to get that 43,000+ photo library down to a more manageable 5,000 photos. And I suspect that’ll take a long, long time.

Until then, I’ll enjoy this look back through the last 10 to 15 years of my life, which have been full of travel and adventure and all kinds of new and exciting things.

Do It Now at Roche Harbor
The last of the duplicates is this great sunset shot from September 2022 at Roche Harbor. It was my first trip in Do It Now, a two-day cruise from Olympia and San Juan Island for the Ranger Tugs/Cutwater Rendezvous. This photo was shot the evening before I started the trip back to Olympia, just me and my pups.

The Crate

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The story of a piece of “furniture” I’ve owned for 41 years.

The crate arrived in the US in 1981, delivered to the Manhattan home of the parents of the guy I was dating back then. It was a large crate, but it arrived from Hungary containing only 12 bottles of Hungarian wine, all nestled in tightly packed straw. Even after the careful packing and protection, one of the bottles arrived broken.

The crate was well made of solid wood pieces. It was heavy — probably about as heavy as the wine it contained — and, as you can imagine, a wealthy couple living on the Upper East Side with a view of the Queensboro Bridge had absolutely no use for it once the wine was removed. Their son, a senior at Hofstra University did, though. He was living in a dorm room and it would make a nice piece of furniture.

The Crate Becomes Furniture

So he brought it back to the dorm, put a pair of hinges on its lid to make a door, and installed a shelf and some cup holder hooks inside it. He then stood it on one end and put his dorm-sized refrigerator on top of it. It made a nice addition to his 9 x 12 dorm room.

I don’t remember if I came into the picture before or after its arrival. I dated Stew for about a year, breaking things off not long after we graduated. I seem to recall him adding the hinges, which means it arrived after I did. But I don’t recall getting the big thing from Manhattan to Hempstead. So who knows? It doesn’t really matter.

When we graduated and moved out of our dorm rooms, he offered up the crate, since he planned to go back to his parents home in Manhattan and definitely didn’t need it. I took it. I liked crate furniture. (I still kind of do.)

The Crate in My Homes

Between my college graduation and today, I’ve lived in exactly five homes.

The first was my first apartment right out of college, which I moved into in spring 1982. It was in a sketchy area of Hempstead, NY, on the sixth floor of an apartment building with windows that included a view of the Hoftstra dorm towers. It was a large studio apartment with separate kitchen and dressing room/closet between the main room and the bathroom. In hindsight, it was actually a nice place, although the area, as I said, was sketchy. A few of my friends were afraid to come visit me. I never had a problem there.

I fixed up the studio into two rooms by placing three tall veneered particleboard bookshelves between my sleeping area and my living room. I had my original bed — the twin I’d grown up sleeping in — and a lot of junk furniture. The crate became my “coffee table,” sitting right in front of the Ikea fold out sofa.

In summer 1983, I met my future wasband. In January 1984, he and I moved into our first apartment together, a third floor walkup in a row of houses right over the Cross Island Parkway in Bayside, NY. The crate came with us. I honestly can’t remember where we put it in that three bedroom apartment. It may have been in the spare room, which became a cat hair infested storage space until I was forced to find homes for my two cats — my future wasband was allergic and had asthma. (To this day, I wish I’d kept the cats and found a home for him.)

Two years later, in January 1985, we bought our first house together. It was an interesting home made entirely of reinforced poured concrete with something like 40 jalousie windows — that’s the kind you crank with a handle to open slats. Built in 1926, it was unique and would have been a fixer-upper if you didn’t mind working with a sledgehammer. On a quiet street in Harrington Park, NJ, there was a Conrail freight train line just beyond the backyard. For 11 years, I lived with freight trains literally a stone’s throw away from my bedroom window.

The crate became the coffee table in the TV room. It was probably around then that we started storing board games in there. By this time, it was used lying on its long side with the hinged lid on the top.

In 1997, my future wasband and I made the move from the New York metropolitan area to Wickenburg, AZ. This was a huge life change. We bought a brand new spec house on 2 1/2 acres of horse property for the same price as the old house along the tracks in New Jersey. Our cost of living plummeted and our quality of living soared. I was in my late 30s and it was my first full-time taste of living away from a metro area. I loved it. (I thought my future wasband did, too, but after hearing from my sister about some of the places he’s lived since we split, I’ve begun to suspect he prefers suburbia.)

My Crate
Here’s the crate in my previous home. Both it and the comfy brown leather sofa that was in that room made the move with me to Washington state.

The crate came with us. It became the table in our TV area on the second floor. We still stored games in it. And I even have a picture of it there, since it was mentioned in an old blog post I wrote while going through my divorce.

In 2013, as my divorce dragged on, I packed up the crate and moved it into storage. When the movers came in September of that year, they took it with everything else all the way up Washington State, where I’d leased a hangar for my helicopter and had plenty of room for my cars, boat, and storage of furniture and household items. The crate — and most of my other stuff — lived in storage for nearly a year.

On May 20, 2014, we broke ground for my current home. By my birthday at the end of June of that year, the shell of my home was finished with the concrete slab laid. I had a party and my friends helped me move just about everything out of the hangar, across the river, and into my new garage. Including the crate.

As my various posts about building my home detail, I did a lot of the interior work on my home myself. Once I had a space to get work done, I started collecting tools. Eventually, I needed a miter saw so I could cut lumber to build a workbench and other things. The saw I bought did not come with a table. I decided to use the crate as a miter saw station — after all, I had more than enough furniture from my old house and wouldn’t need the crate as another coffee table. I put wheels on the bottom of the crate — nearly everything in my garage has wheels so I can move it — and mounted the miter saw on top. I put new shelves inside the crate to store saw blades and related parts.

And since then, I’ve used the saw on its crate table to build all kinds of things out of lumber: a workbench, 8 garage shelving units, a jewelry bench, two chicken coops, and small tool tables. I also used it extensively while finishing the upstairs of my home to cut Pergo for the floors, lumber for stem walls and rails, and trim throughout my home. The beauty of the saw on that table is that I can roll it anywhere I need to in the downstairs space when I need it and then roll it out of the way when I’m done.


Here’s the crate and its saw in its current location. I’ve set aside a 12 x 12 section of my garage as a workshop for building and repairing things. The crate has been the home for my miter saw for 9 years now.

The Crate Today

I’m in the midst of a huge garage reorganization project and I finally found what is likely to be the “forever home” for the crate and its miter saw. I’ve been tooting my progress on social media — Mastodon — with photos. This morning, I looked at a recent toot that showed a photo of it and thought about my history with this crate. I think I’ve owned it longer than just about anything I currently own. I can’t remember a single thing — other than a handful of keepsakes from my childhood and college years — that I’ve owned longer.

And that inspired me to share this blog post.

I have no real emotional attachment to this crate — please don’t think I do. It’s just its utility that makes me respect and keep it. Someone took the time to build this out of nice, strong wood. It crossed an ocean carrying just 12 bottles of wine and came close to being discarded. Instead, it’s had a long life as part of my life — and it continues to serve me to this day.

How many things do you own that you can say the same about?

It Really IS All about Calories

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Stop with the fad diets already! The only ones that really work are the ones that reduce calorie intake.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I’m dieting. I’m doing it for my physical and mental health. I think those are the two best reasons to get back in shape, no matter what that entails.

I started the diet on May 1 of this year and have lost, as of this morning, 19.6 pounds. I want to lose a lot more. I’ve done it before and I felt great. But then I just got back into my old overeating habits and, over the course of 10 years or so, gained it all back. So now I’m dieting again, taking my body back to 2012. I have about 40 pounds to go, so I’m nearly 1/3 there.

And yes, I did weigh “that much.” I’m 5’8″ tall and I can hide those pounds. But I still have to carry them.

Don’t Be Dumb about Dieting

When I mention to folks that I’m dieting, they immediately respond with recommendations for the various fad diets or techniques they use. It happened just this morning when I went to the clinic to have blood drawn for bloodwork on my annual physical. I had to fast so I was there when they opened at 7:00 AM. I was back home with my first cup of coffee 30 minutes later.

The phlebotomist — that’s the woman in her 30s who drew my blood — said that the only way she can lose weight is to cut out carbs. And because she’s allergic to dairy like milk and cheese, she has trouble getting enough protein.

“Are you a vegetarian?” I asked, not quite understanding.

“No,” she said, “but there are only so many kinds of meat out there.”

I was flabbergasted. This was coming from a medical professional who was certainly young enough to understand how to use Google — just in case the dozens of doctors and nurses around her all day long couldn’t provide advice. (The medical center she works for also has dietitians on staff and I suspect it would cost a lot less for her to talk to them than for me, provided I wanted to wait four months for an appointment.)

I was going to remind her it was all about calories, but then she was done taking blood and wrapping my arm with a gauze pad and what I’ll always think of as vet wrap. I was done and people were waiting. I left.

But it really and truly is all about calories. We eat food that provides energy, which is quantified as calories, to our bodies. Throughout the day, we move, sit, walk, nap, lift heavy things, climb stairs, and maybe even jog or bike or do something really active. All those activities — yes, even napping or vegging out in front of the TV — burn calories. If we eat more energy than we need, our bodies store it as fat. If we use more energy than we eat, our bodies should tap into those fat reserves and burn fat.

I will put myself out there and say this, which I am 100% convinced of: it is not possible to lose weight without reducing calorie intake or increasing activity levels to burn more calories or both. Ask your doctor. I cannot imagine her disagreeing.

Doing the Math

So every day your body is doing math for you. Well, it’s not actually doing the math. It’s just doing what it does. But you can do the math yourself if you keep track of the calories in what you eat and have some way of calculating the calories you burn — like maybe a smart watch or FitBit?


Here’s Sunday in a nutshell: calories consumed, calories burned, and basic nutritional information.

I use a calorie tracker app that’s really easy to use, mostly because it has just about all packaged and chain restaurant food programmed into it. I’m on a diet, so I’m not eating out much. I’m eating food that’s on my diet plan, mostly because its easy and its nutritionally balanced. But I’m also making my own meal once a day and I’m weighing everything that goes into it. I’d say that my daily calorie count is about 90% accurate; that means I’m only off by about 10% if at all. I’m comfortable with the margin of error.

My Apple Watch (series 3, folks; I don’t need more) keeps track of my activity levels — although I honestly think it doesn’t count flights of stairs right. (I definitely climb the stairs more in my home than my watch says I do.) It automatically imports my activity, included my estimated calorie burn, to my phone, which is where my calorie counter app lives. The app gets the data and displays it on my Food page for the day, as you can see in the screen grab here for Sunday, when I was pretty active. I’m not sure how accurate this count is, but I’d say it’s within 25% of what it reports. So if it says I burned 2000 calories, I feel pretty confident that the real number is between 1500 and 2500 calories. I know that’s a big spread, but it’s close enough for me. My goal is for my watch and health app to report a calorie burn of at least 1800 calories a day.

I’m restricting my calorie intake to about 1000 calories. I’m not kidding around here, folks. I want to lose all the weight this summer, before I go back to the boat. For those of you who think this isn’t healthy, understand that the diet plan food is nutritionally balanced — as I said above — and, just in case, I take a quality daily vitamin/mineral supplement for women aged 50+. During the first two weeks, I had occasional days where I felt a bit out-of-sorts, but I’ve been fine since then. Certainly enough energy to get my work done, including more than a few strenuous chores.

The math is pretty simple. According to many reputable sources, 1 pound of weight equals 3500 calories. (And yes, I’m aware that this “rule of thumb” isn’t a foolproof formula for losing weight. If you research this, be sure to focus on what’s said by reputable sources and not the top Google hits, which are sponsored and not reliable.) So using Sunday as an example, I took in 1014 calories and burned 2423 calories. That’s a net of 1409 — I burned 1409 more calories than I took in.

I need to add a few things about this diet that I think are important. The diet plan wants me to eat six times a day. Most meals — the packaged bars and microwavable “hearty” foods — are 90 to 110 calories each. So that’s 500 calories for 5 meals eaten 2 to 3 hours apart. The small portions are hard to keep you feeling satisfied when you first start, but within a week or two, they become enough to keep you from getting hungry until next mealtime. I really believe that spreading the calorie intake over the entire day — rather than “fasting” (which so many people are pushing these days) — prevents your body from going into a sort of “starvation mode” where it might start burning muscle instead of fat.

The final meal — which I usually have midday — is “lean and green”: real food that includes a lean protein like just about any meat in the right portion size and a salad or green vegetable. I do salad and I buy boxes of baby mixed greens and other salad veggies to make it interesting. Low calorie or “lite” dressing. The other day, I had a grilled 4-ounce ribeye steak and a bowl of salad with lettuces, cabbage, cucumber, tomato, raw mushrooms, and a nice balsamic vinaigrette dressing. So I’m not exactly suffering here.

The other ingredient to this diet is water. Drinking lots and lots of water. My “diet coach” claims that the water makes me burn fat, but I’m not 100% convinced it’s as easy as that. I do know that on days when I drink more water, my weigh-ins have bigger ticks down. I drink a lot of plain water and water flavored with Gatorade Zero, which adds electrolytes I might need from working in the heat of summer. No diet soda or juice.

This is basically the same diet I used in 2012 to lose 45 pounds in 4 months. Back then, I didn’t count calories or have a watch that monitored my activity, but I still lost weight. When I was off the diet, my stomach wasn’t expecting those big meals, so it took a few years for me to go back to my nasty, stupid overeating habits and start gaining it all back. I still can’t believe I let that happen; I won’t let it happen again.

And one more thing: could I do this without the diet plan food? Yes, but it would be a lot more difficult. I’d have to come up with five food portions a day that were right around 100 calories each. I’d have to make sure they were nutritious. I’d have to count every calorie for every ingredient in every meal to make sure I wasn’t going over the allowed amount. That would be a lot more difficult than just buying the damn food and eating that.

Weighing In


Yes, I cropped out the numbers. But you can see the trend and that’s all that really matters.

My daily weigh-in, which is also on that calorie counter app, tracks my progress and gives me a space to write notes every day. I report when I “cheat” — for example, having street tacos for lunch instead of my “lean and green” meal.

A lot of folks say you shouldn’t weigh in daily, but I don’t care. I do. It keeps me motivated. Watching the scale tick down daily — with the occasional tick back up a tad — helps me monitor my process and see that I’m moving forward.

Why Those Fad Diets “Work”

You might be wondering why the fad diets you’ve tried have worked for you. I can attest to the fact that the Atkins diet worked for me back in 2004; I lost 20 pounds back then and felt pretty darn good. Until I went off it, of course.

Did you ever think about how cutting carbs out of your diet, for example, actually affects calorie intake? Or how fasting twice a week affects the total number of calories you take in for the week? Or how the Atkins diet or Paleo diet or Whole 30 diet fill-in-the-blank diet really affect calorie intake?

And how many of those diets are actually healthy? I think the Mediterranean diet is, but it’s definitely not the kind of diet you’d use to lose a lot of weight quickly. It’s more like the kind of diet you’d switch to when you were at or near your ideal weight to stay healthy and eat right. It seems smart, to me, and, to be honest, it’s kind of how I eat anyway. (I just eat too much!)

And yes, I’ve gotten lots of recommendations about Weight Watchers. I cannot comment on it because I’ve never tried it. But I have to think that any diet that promotes healthy eating in moderation is a good diet. And if it helps you lose weight when you need to, even better.

Going Forward after Meeting My Goal

In my world, it’s all about portion control. I like to eat good food. I don’t eat junk food or fast food, but I’ll have huge portions of an excellent stew (with noodles!) or fresh baked bread or just about anything tasty. I need to eat less of what I do eat. That’s my go-forward once I’m down to my ideal weight.

I never want to do this diet again. I just want to eat smart in moderation. If I do that and stay active, I shouldn’t be in this mess again.

And don’t fool yourself — losing weight and staying fit isn’t about making yourself look good for other people. It isn’t about rail thin supermodels or societal norms. It’s about your health.

Sure, there are plenty of fat people who live long lives, but are they physically able to make the most of those lives? Do they have nagging health issues that hold them back? Bad knees, shortness of breath, stomach issues? Who wants to be like that?

I don’t.