Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 40

Best Laid Plans

I've been buying adhesive plastic pockets for my planners for a few years. Ever since my favorite planner changed their pocket style. The new pocket they put in was narrower and didn't hold this little book I have that I call the Planner Nerve Center. It's got long term lists inside. Like maybe even ten years out.

I was hoping my 2022 planner would have better pockets, but alas, it's worse. Only one pocket in the front of the planner. I can put my stickers in there, but I need a pocket in the back for the Planner Nerve Center.

The plastic pockets I buy were on sale this summer, so I picked some up in anticipation of my 2022 planner. Good planning on my part, right?

There's a small problem. I can't find them.

They're in my office. Somewhere. I know this, but I have no clue where I put them for safe keeping. Have I mentioned that my office is a disaster and that it needs a major, major clean up? I bought storage boxes to help organize the space, but I haven't taken the time to do it yet. And let's face it, the job isn't fun either.

Of course, it's not any fun either to tear the office apart looking for plastic pockets. Gah! I wish I could remember where I stashed them.

Edited to Add: I found them. They'd fallen behind a piece of furniture that was difficult to move, but I have them now.

Deer Me, The Sequel

Back in October, I blogged about an encounter on the highway with a deer. Unfortunately, this isn't my sole close encounter of the terrifying kind.

A couple of weeks after that event, I was driving to work and there was a deer standing in the median between the six lanes. Three going each direction. Luckily, it remained still and I didn't have any kind of adventure with that one.

Then there was deer number three.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on my way to work. It was early and it was dark. Like always. (I want to work from home!!! But that's not what this post is about.) I was nearly to the heart of the neighboring suburb and kind of figured my odds of encountering a deer in this section of the road was slim. I didn't let down my guard completely, but I was slightly more relaxed than usual.

I am approaching the road right before the biggest, most major junction of highways in this city when it happened.

A deer ran across the road in front of me.

Because I was nearly to the heart of this city, I couldn't have my brights on. Too much traffic. And in fact, a car was in front of me in the lane to my left. The deer ran behind him and in front of me.

And let me tell you if that thing hadn't been running full tilt, I would have hit it. I couldn't see it in time to stop. I was nearly on top of it before I ever spotted it.

I'm grateful I missed it. I'm grateful it was running fast. I'm grateful there were no other deer following it. But I was shaking the rest of the way to work. Actually, I was still shaking at work for a while. That was scary!

One quirky note. The deer used the crosswalk to cross the highway. She's no jaywalker! But she forgot to push the button for the walk signal.

Audio, Please

You should listen to this podcast episode, my friend said while were messaging.

It sounded cool, but when I went to my phone app to get it, I discovered that this particular podcast didn't turn up in my search. Hmmm, I thought, that's strange.

I followed the link my friend sent and the website had a video. There were all kinds of links on the page, but I couldn't spot an audio feed. Surely, there must be one because audio is much more convenient than video.

But no matter how hard I looked, I didn't spot one.

I messaged my friend again and she says, oh, no, it is video only. She listens to the video while she's doing other things.

This is a real problem for me because most of my podcast time is while I'm working at my day job or while I'm driving in my car. Our public Wi-Fi at work sucks--and that's putting it mildly. I tried anyway. And like I expected, it was a choppy, annoying mess. Listening in the car is completely out of the question because I have a cheap plan without much data because I'm almost always connected to some Wi-Fi network.

Making everything extra fun is the bonus feature that YouTube shuts the video down--picture and sound--when I lock my screen. If I wanted to be able to shut it off and just listen, I would have to subscribe to their premium service.

I needed a work around, so I started doing some online searching. I found a website that will convert video to audio and allow you to download it. Bingo!

This worked perfectly. I downloaded the MP3 file to Dropbox and then imported it to my podcast app. But...

What a PITA.

I don't know why the content creator didn't throw together an audio only feed, but she didn't and video is not convenient for me. I can't be the only person who feels this way. And while I would love to listen to more of this video podcast, I don't have the time to convert every episode to audio, so I'm out unless a particular week catches my interest.

It's really unfortunate because it's good information.

Review: The 12 Dates of Christmas

I seem to watch more television and movies around the holidays. Or maybe it just feels that way? I don't know, but I've been finding some shows/films that I've enjoyed.

My latest watch was The 12 Dates of Christmas available for free streaming for Amazon Prime members on their service. I don't know if it's available on the other streamers or not.

So it was late, but not late enough to go to bed last weekend and so I flipped through Netflix, hoping to stumble across another awesome find like the TV show I blogged about last week. Nothing grabbed my attention, so I switched to Amazon and started scrolling the "Free to Me" section. 12 Dates caught my eye.

First, let me mention that a little searching revealed that there are two projects titled The 12 Dates of Christmas. One of them is a TV series. I did NOT watch this. I watched the movie from 2011 starring Amy Smart as Kate Stanton and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Miles Dufine.

Second, of course, I received no compensation of any kind. This is just me talking about a movie I liked.

So Kate is in advertising and on Christmas Eve she's been setup on a blind date, but wants to get her ex-boyfriend back even though they've been broken up for quite some time. The blind date doesn't go well because she's intent on cutting out and finding the ex. She does, only to discover he's about to propose to his new girlfriend.

Kate's in bed at midnight when the clock rewinds and she wakes up again on Christmas Eve. In the same department store she'd been in the day before. Of course, she's confused and it takes her some time to believe what's going on. Then it happens again.

I'll stop here because I don't want to give out any spoilers. This movie is basically Groundhog Day, but for Christmas. And as you might have guessed from the title, Kate lives through Christmas Eve 12 times.

This movie was fun! If it wasn't a holiday movie, it probably wouldn't work as well because part of it's charm is the time of year. It's got romance. It has a heroine who changes and grows through these 12 days and I love when that happens. Are some of the changes happening a little fast? Probably, but I didn't care. I was hooked. And it has likeable characters. There is no bad guy here, just people trying to do their best.

Recommended for the holidays.

New App Discovery

I was scrolling through Facebook when I saw a link to a website that let you listen to radio stations around the world. Any of them. It didn't matter if they were in the US, Canada, France, Japan, Peru, or New Zealand.

Of course, I headed over to check it out because is there anything more intriguing than media from other countries? Although, I did start by scrolling up to Minnesota--my former home--and checking in on some local stations first.

Then I went international.

I started with Canada, started scrolling toward Europe before quickly reversing and heading for Australia.

And I found my new favorite radio station. :-)

First, let me say that I don't like my radio options in Atlanta. There's one station that's okay, but it's way outside of the city and I lose it pretty quickly. Also too much time spent talking or doing ads.

Second, this radio station website has an app. It's called Radio Garden. So now I have a radio on my iPhone. (Sorry, I didn't save the link to the website, but if you want to check it out, I'm sure you can find it by searching online for Radio Garden.)

Third, the screen in my car went blank, so I don't even have a radio in my car right now. Also, while I'm working, I can listen at my desk. In a building where a radio signal would have a hard time penetrating.

And yes, I can stream because of Amazon Prime, but then I have to make decisions. Tuning into a radio station means someone else is choosing and I'm okay with that. If I want to listen to a particular song, then I can go to a streaming app, but for casual listening, this is perfect for me.

So what radio station did I find?

It's in Sydney, Australia and it's called iHeart Radio Australia - The 80s. Yes, all 80s music all the time, and unlike the 80s station we used to have in Minneapolis once upon a time, this station doesn't play the same 100 songs over and over. So far, I've only heard 2 songs more than once and they've played music I don't remember, so not stuff that got heavy airplay.

Even better? The station has no commercials! 

Yes! Commercial free, all 80s, all the time. Does it get any better than this?

The app is free. There are pop up ads, but they're visual and don't interrupt the music, so I can live with them.

I received no compensation of any kind for this blog post. I just love having music from around the world available to me and thought I'd share. Also 80s without commercials. :-)

Thinking About the Musketeers

I was thinking about my musketeers the other day (AKA: Ryder, Finn, JT, and Kyle) and about their family backgrounds.

Yes, the mind of a writer is strange, but there was a good reason for the subject.

If you read Wicked Salvation, you saw that Kyle goes through life with a smirk on his face and enjoys stirring the pot for fun. You also know that he spent time in a Catholic boys' boarding school in Rio Blanco, Puerto Jardin.

Kyle is good at hiding things from me and I'm trying to come up with how he felt about his mother dying and his father leaving him at boarding school while he worked as an engineer in South America. He hasn't been forthcoming which leads me to believe there's some issue buried here.

And so this got me thinking about Ryder, who comes from a loving family. Finn who grew up in foster care. JT who was raised by his widowed mother who didn't remarry until Griff was in high school. These guys have different backgrounds, but they've become more than brothers. As Griff would say, they are the four musketeers. :-)

BTW, the musketeers thing was not planned. It was Griff who through that into the mix while I was writing Ryder's book. When I wrote it in Wicked Obsession, it felt like a throwaway line. It wasn't. It became the bedrock of the friendship between these men.

Review: Dash & Lily

Late on Thanksgiving, I was flipping through Netflix, trying to find something to watch. I wasn't ready to go to bed yet, but I didn't want to stay up for a two hour movie either. Everything that intrigued me was long, though. And then I spotted a show that was only a half an hour long.

Dash & Lily is a Netflix original series that kicks off with the hero finding a red hardcover notebook at the bookstore. In it, he meets a girl who gives him some dares.

I was hooked. My "quick" show ended up being a major binge. It actually would have taken less time to watch that two hour movie than I spent watching episode after episode.

IIRC, there are eight episodes. And through them, we see Dash and Lily become intrigued with each other through their written words. They don't meet, and for part of the series, they don't know each other's names. And then once Dash finds out Lily's name, he still withholds his because of how unusual it is.

Oh, FYI, the characters are teenagers. At one point we learn they're seventeen. The storyline makes a lot more sense if you have this information.

Dash is cynical. His parents are divorced and it seems both are self-involved. Neither even realizes Dash is on his own for Christmas.

Lily comes from a loving extended family and she adores Christmas. But this year, her parents are in Fiji and her grandfather is in Florida. It's her brother and his boyfriend that start the notebook game for Lily because she's never dated.

Dash and Lily are good for each other. He gets her out of her comfort zone, and she gets him to stop reacting the same way to things as he has in the past. So when Dash ends up at dinner with his father and the father's girlfriend of the month, he's able to avoid an argument and build bridges. Something he wouldn't have been able to do before the notebook game with Lily.

The series is charming and the actors do a great job making it all seem so believable. Even the secondary cast did a great job. There's a lot of layers and nuance for our hero and heroine, which helped me engage in the series.

I don't want to give too much away, but this is a great series to watch around Christmas since all the events take place around the holiday season. 

The downer is that when I finished the episodes, I checked to see if there would be a season 2. There won't be. Netflix cancelled the series. The good news, though, is season one felt complete. In fact, maybe it's better this way because in my imagination, I can have Lily and Dash date through college, get married, and spend their lives together. Living their own HEA. If there were a season two, the series writers would have to think up ways to keep the drama going. 

If you're looking for about four hours of watch time--available in half hour episodes--I highly recommend Dash & Lily. I'm giving it two enthusiastic thumbs up.

Happy Thanksgiving!

To my American friends, Happy Thanksgiving! Know that I'm grateful for all of you and thank you so much for reading my books and visiting my blog!

Sometimes Change Isn't Good

I started to put stickers in my 2022 planner. With every single sticker, I started feeling frustrated that my usual planner--the one I've purchased for the past five years or so--decided to change the layout. If you recall, I blogged about how they added "features" that felt like too much work and took away real estate from the parts of the daily page I really need (and use the most).

It felt so stupid that I had to take time to 1) print all those damn stickers and 2) place them all down in the new planner. My old planner company makes changes every year, but the 2020 version of their planner was the best. 2021 was workable. 2022 didn't fit me.

I took pictures of my 2021 planner and my 2022 planner so you can see what I had and what I have now. I circled the areas I'm complaining about.

Here is 2022 and the new planner. You can see I added stickers to keep track of my sleep, my water intake, and my vitamins. I was originally hoping to group all three at the top, but the sleep sticker was too tall and I was forced to reconfigure my plan.

And this is my planner for 2021. As you can see, on the side of the page, vitamins, water, and sleep are pre-printed. (And there's a little checkbox for exercise, too! But I have stickers for that...which I'll also be adding to the new planner.) Now you can see why I was getting frustrated. So clean, so easy, so convenient. So perfect.

But you can also see that on the To Do side of the planner page, there's a place to record breakfast, lunch and dinner. In 2020, it was only dinner and I lost two lines of To Do List. You can also see in the upper left that there is priorities, self care, and money spent. This took away more lines from my To Do List.

I wasn't thrilled. I need that To Do List. There are days I have to write two items on each line because I'm so busy, so losing them hurt.

And in 2022, the company revised the page and took away even more lines from the To Do List.

That's when I said no matter how much I love those trackers on the side of the page, this is losing too much utility for me.

As much as I disliked putting those stickers in, look how much more room I have in the new planner! It's a little bigger, which I'm not sure how I feel about yet, but the space! And there's still room to record my workouts, birthdays and anniversaries, and add decorative stickers.

My former planner has broken my heart. Sometimes change isn't good. Sometimes it's only change.

Missing Mojo

I lost my knitting mojo.

It disappeared when I put everything aside to work on finishing Wicked Salvation. First there was the power writing stretch, then multiple rounds of revisions, then copy edits, then publishing and there simply wasn't time to knit.

Then when I did have time again, nothing interested me. Certainly not the shawl with the very repetitive and boring pattern. Not the other shawl with a lot of futzy, PITA stitches that were interesting at first, but became repetitive. And not any of the other projects I'd started.

There's something so relaxing about settling down in the evening with a project and relaxing, watching a movie, and knitting. That's why I began knitting--to reduce my stress and anxiety.

Maybe this is why I'm doing sewing right now. It's all new and it's creative. Not as relaxing as knitting, that's for certain. And while I improved dramatically with my second knot bag, my ability to sew T-shirts remains dismal. I had to rip out the stitches on another collar and (again) I made holes in the fabric. :-(

This picture is the second knot bag. To see pictures of the first, you can check out this blog post.

I don't know if my difficulty in sewing T-shirts is because they're knit and the bags are easier because they're cotton, which is woven or not. Both have curved seams involved and neither seems particularly difficult, but I struggle anyway. I'm hoping the third time is the charm with the T-shirt. It's sure not the second time like with the bag. :-/

Anyway, I miss knitting. I want to feel excited to work on something again. In the meantime, I guess I'll struggle with sewing and do some writing.