At the end of Under a Green Sky, Ward turns to the human consequences of the current global warming. The main thrust of his book has been the evidence that greenhouse gases were the driving force in the numerous previous mass extinctions, but the absolutely unprecedented recent rise in these gases really won't let us ignore the logical conclusion that another mass extinction is likely to occur soon. And it is impossible to avoid imagining what would happen to us humans if it did. Will we, with our Doomsday Vault full of seeds and ever-improving air conditioning, all gather in the high middles of big countries and ride it out?

Ward offers three future scenarios:

1. We get our act together, quit driving so much, rein in industry, and things don't get worse. We suffer through extreme weather, millions are displaced as coastlines in places like Bangladesh rise by about five feet, and the increase in the insect-to-bird ratio we are already seeing continues to allow the increase of tropical diseases -- but we mostly survive.
2. We continue to mess things up at the current rate, and face mass extinctions by the end of the century.
3. The people of China, India, Mexico, and Thailand decide that they too have a right to two car garages and climate control, and we mess things up so fast that we face not just displaced people, wholesale climate change with resulting shifts in food supply and political power, global resurgence of tropical diseases, the death of the oceans, and the extinction of 10% of all species in the next couple of decades, but also World War III as people become more and more desperate for food, potable water, and dry ground. Then a mass extinction rivaling that of the Permian Era takes place, and we are no longer interested parties in the story of the Earth.

If you are scientifically-minded, check out realclimate.org for more interesting stuff on the subject. If you are not scientifically-minded, but still interested, check out Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. There is a version for kids which is an easier read. If you do not believe that global warming is a problem, then I don't know what you should do. My husband doesn't believe in petrified wood. Some of the old people in his country when he was a child didn't believe that the earth went around ("Look at the trees," they would say when smart aleck kids like him came home from school with such stories. "If the earth moved as you say, they would be waving around more.") You can believe whatever you want, as long as you will make an effort at conservation.

Now, suppose that you wanted to make such an effort, but feel, as Chanthaboune's coworker said, that there is nothing you can do personally. There is a book I would recommend to you (I've recommended it before, but I think it is still accurate): The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists. This book does not give you 365 little things you should worry about. It lists and clearly explains the main things you and I can do that will actually make a difference to our environment.

• Drive less. When next you buy a car, choose a fuel-efficient one.
• Eat less meat, and buy or grow organic produce.
• Be conservation-minded in your use of household fuels for heating and hot water; accept a little bit of discomfort.
• Choose efficient lighting and appliances.
• Don't use hazardous chemicals (give up dry cleaning and leave chlorine for those who really need it).
• Don't buy things you don't need. When you do buy things, let them be renewable (bamboo, not mahogany or plastic, and forget that ocelot coat) and durable.

For me, it was helpful to know that all the little controversies (paper or plastic? disposable or requiring washing in hot water?) were not making as big a difference as the few big things. We can't, or at least won't, do everything we could to make that difference, so it is sensible to do the things that make the most impact.

As for Ward's book, I really enjoyed it and would certainly recommend it, but you do need some background in the sciences and a high tolerance for numbers.

Hey! It's Leap Day! Girls can propose to boys, and we all get an extra day to catch up.

Wouldn't that be great? If Leap Day meant that everyone got to spend the whole day catching up on the things they were behind on, and nothing new happened, we were not expected to conduct our normal business, and if what we needed to catch up on was sleep or play, that would be fine, because it is an extra day outside of time?

Yes, well. Heading up to the store, myself, after doing some work on my business. If I happen to be able to close up two of the six shows I have out there today, I will win a prize. Of course, if I submit them next week, I'll also win a prize. Central Office gives out prizes with really stunning frequency.

They also produce bamboo tools, offer lifetime guarantees (see "durable" above), support women, and give to food banks, so I'm pretty happy with them.

One thing about using a treadmill... you can tell any difference in energy levels right away. I did 30 minutes on the treadmill both Monday and Wednesday, and the difference was striking. On Monday, I moved my reading material out of the way to do an "Are we there yet?" check and was surprised to see that it had only been 10 minutes; on Wednesday, I wasn't moved to peek till 28 minutes. On Monday, I put the grade at a comfortable spot and found when I looked that it was 4.5; on Wednesday, I didn't check how high I had put it, but when I moved it back down for cooldown, I was surprised to see that it was only down to 6, and I had to move it down more and cooldown a bit longer. On Monday I was slogging along, and on Wednesday I was dancing along.

I don't know why. The weekend did involve less sleep, more sitting, and richer foods than normal, but weekends often do. I started my period on Wednesday, so I guess I was pre-periodic on Monday, but I never pay much attention to that. I was reading Smithsonian on Monday and Wired on Wednesday, so maybe the sheer modernity of the magazine made the difference. I don't know. Maybe my improvement in Ubiquitously Capturing made me more light-hearted.

Actually, I like that term a lot, and the concept, too. I shared it with my study group yesterday. I used the coffee as the example. And then I actually left the church without buying any coffee. Clearly, there are still a few bugs in the system.

I caught a ride home with Janalisa. #2 son drove me there (with his learner's permit and a growing grasp of how to keep the car in the right place, thank goodness) on his way to work, and then #1 son took the car and went to something called "Boogie Boulder" or "Bouldering Bop" or something like that. I am sure I have it wrong. There was alliteration, and it involved bouldering and then some word referring to music. It is the rock climbing equivalent of "Rock 'n' Bowl," an event involving music and bowling which has been a teen mainstay around here for as long as I've had teens.

We were talking. I wasn't thinking about coffee, and I didn't look at my list. Oh, well.

Have you been wondering about what Peter Ward has to say about global warming and mass extinctions? I don't think that most of you are going to read this book, so I don't feel bad about revealing things as I get to the ending. There has been lots of suspense as we learn what paleobiologists and chemical geologists were thinking in the '80s and then the '90s, and now we are all the way up to the discoveries of the first years of the 21st century.

It has been largely proven, at least to my satisfaction, that the mass extinctions of the past were in fact caused by greenhouse gases, and that I can expect to live (assuming we do nothing about it) to see the extinction of 60% of the currently living species. We could be one of the extinct ones, of course, but in that case, I won't live to see it. It is pretty impressive, I'd say, that Dr. Ward has argued this complex point in a combination of blank verse and graphs. His word picture of the Canfield oceans belching forth toxic gases on the Arizona coastline, under a pale green sky (I'm seeing it as chartreuse, but a faint avocado could also be very effective), will be with me forever, I am sure.

The startling new thing in the penultimate chapter is the suggestion that the earth might well have been on its way into another of its periodic ice ages, were it not for agriculture and industry. The jury is apparently still out on this one, but our world has never (according to the evidence of ice cores and sedimentary rocks) seen a rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases like the one we've produced since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And up to a point, it could have been good for us humans. Relative balminess is better than sheets of ice, and the last 10,000 years have been an unusually stable time for the climate of the earth.

But it is like a light switch, Ward suggests. However slowly you push it, the lights will not gradually come on. You will just slowly move toward the point at which the connection is made and the lights appear. If we compare our current world with its former conditions, it is clear that a tropical world is right around the corner.

Not for the the first time, of course. There are fossils of crocodiles and palm fronds up near the arctic circle. We've had a tropical world before.

Or rather, Earth has been tropical. We weren't there at the time.

Ward makes the very intriguing claim that, even though people can and do live in places where heat and humidity both hover around 98 (degrees and percent, respectively), we aren't any good at it. He points out the ubiquity of natural drug use (coca, betel nut, etc.) among people in tropical climes, and the lassitude of people who have to live in such places without air conditioning. I don't know about that. I do know that the place where I live is like that for about six weeks, and before we had air conditioning, we could hardly do a thing when it was that hot, but I haven't seen any scientific studies of this topic, and Ward doesn't cite any.

So we'll get all tropical, and it might not be good for us, and the coastlines and deltas will go under, taking much of our food supply with them, and then there will be so much of these greenhouse gases that it will not just be about heat any more, but about toxicity, oxygenated oceans (not a good thing), acidity, and dreadful poisonous death.

Ward isn't talking much about the spell of wild weather and enormous storms which earlier books on the subject predicted, because we're there right now, and there's little point in predicting things that are already happening.

Current predictions, based on an assumption that we will not change our behavior, suggest that we will be seeing this next mass extinction around 2060.

Do you have grandchildren? If not, you probably plan to be alive in 2060, if the Lord tarries, as they say in the country churches around here. If your plans do not include either the Rapture or a great big change in how you use natural resources, you may be able to enjoy that green sky firsthand, or your grandchildren will.

I realized something yesterday. I'm coming up on my birthday, and you know how you think about where you'd like to be in  five or ten years on such occasions? For the first time in a quarter of a century, I might not have kids at home by then.

My eldest is 25, so for almost 26 years now I've been a mom, and that has been my main priority.The birthday in question is my 50th birthday (I almost don't want to write that, as though my xanga friends will think "She's that old?!" and never speak to me again), so I have spent more than half my life being primarily a mom. My youngest is 16, so he might very well be grown up and gone in five years, and certainly will be in ten.

The things that I put off while I was taking care of my kids might not actually be the goals I want to work towards any more. I'm not sure. I need to think about that.

I was in fact thinking about that on the way to yesterday's morning workshop. It was supposed to be a normal grades 3-5 workshop, and I had lots of fun stuff for the teachers to do -- we were going to make centers, and books with pockets, and learn the state song, and I would run through a witty and amusing cocktail-party level history of our state, much more Bill Bryson than Barbara Tuchman. Half the elementary school teachers in my workshops have never taken a class in our state history, and the others have generally forgotten most of it, so I try to give them a sense of the whole sweep of it, with some amusing anecdotes to anchor specific activities. I give them very few dates and almost no names of individuals. It is a low-key approach to history, suitable for people who are going to teach a unit to elementary school kids with no books available.

What I had in my workshops was eighth grade teachers of state history. They have the textbook and have been teaching a full semester of the state history for years.

It was a bit of a shock. I had to put away my plans, and we had a two hour conversation about our state history, with me sharing the cool stories and a few hands-on ideas, and the teachers getting a chance to share frustrations with their classroom circumstances. I think it turned out okay, but there were definitely moments when I wanted to offer them their money back and give up. (If you're wondering why I didn't, it's because all our teachers are required to do two hours of state history training every year, and these guys had come a long way to get their two hours, so by golly they needed to get those two hours.)

My afternoon workshop was canceled. It doesn't matter; we'll bill them anyway, I still get paid, I'll do it for them when they can come up with a time. But they called to say they had a conflict and would I come a bit later? I agreed and they said they'd work it out and call right back , and then forty-five minutes later called to say they wanted to cancel and reschedule later, so that was 45 minutes of doing random stuff while waiting for that call.

Not that there wasn't plenty of random stuff to do.

Still, it felt like an odd day. And I had stuff on my mind -- like getting my taxes done, a task which has several things I have to do first before I can go ahead with that -- and stuff on my to-do list that I had not prepared to do yesterday because of the workshops, but which I could have gone ahead with had I known the afternoon one would be canceled. I skipped my Tuesday night class to rehearse with the choirlet, and it was a good rehearsal, so I felt better by the end of the day.

David Allen (is that his name? The GTD guy) writes about this reaction to changes in our work plans. We have our pre-planned work, our to-do list, he says, and then we have the work that arises and the changes made by people with authority to change our plans, and we also have the work like filing or planning that is involved in defining our work. We get stressed over the way other things come up and mess with our to-do list, he says, but we shouldn't. It's all work.

Among his ideas, the one that I have found most useful so far is Ubiquitous Capture. I would have said I was already doing that, but it wasn't as Ubiquitous as I had thought. Yesterday morning, for example, I noticed we were low on coffee, and thought I had better get some. This morning, having not gotten any coffee, I noticed it again and thought that again as I made a pot. Then, when I poured my husband's coffee, I thought it again -- and finally got out my planner and wrote it down. I buy coffee from the Fair Trade table at the church, I'll be at church for rehearsals tonight, so I wrote it on my to-do list for today. Had I done that in the first place, I wouldn't have had to think about it three times. I have a show coming up next week. I started to put it into my software when the hostess booked it, but didn't have her address. I took her packet to her yesterday, failed to get her address, and came home and started to put her show in and realized that I don't have her address, and then this morning put the computer work for her show onto my to-do list. So once again, I had three thinking-about-it spells, and inefficiency, before actually writing it down. I'm working on getting to one thought, capture, and processing.

For today, I have 11 tasks on my to-do list, plus my normal workday, plus the gym, book club, study group, bells, and choir. It would definitely be stressful to be thinking about things over and over. Things like coffee, I mean, or getting an address. Instead, if I have thinking time, I can put it toward contemplating my future life as an empty-nester, or the role of greenhouse gases in mass extinctions since the Permian era. That's the kind of thing that's worth thinking about.

It is customary nowadays, in movies and in even in books, to open with a scene of horrific violence, before moving on to the actual plot. I guess this is intended to reassure the moviegoer: yes, there are lace collars and farthingales, but hey! there's going to be gore as well.

I've noticed this in films of Shakespeare's plays, as well. If gore isn't an option for the opening, there will certainly be naked women. I imagine this stuff as a sop to people who've gone to the movie with friends even though they hate costume dramas, Shakespeare, etc.

So To Kill a King, one of this month's review items from Amazon, starts out with blood and internal organs on the battlefield. I averted my eyes. After that, it's a bit confusing for a while, but #1 son assured me that this is the way modern movies are. Eventually, if you are pretty clear on the history of England's civil war, you can figure out what's going on. It is the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell, including the death of King Charles.

The death of King Charles was an enormous big deal. Not that people all over the world said to themselves, "Lopped off his head, did they? Well, I guess that's the end of the Divine Right of Kings. Let's have a revolution!"

But that was the effect. Once you compress it all, the way you can once a thing is history rather than current events. Current events take place so slowly that we can't properly see what's going on. History is much clearer. Sometimes I look forward to having our current events become history so that they will make more sense, although there is a bit of worry with stuff like globalization, global warming, and the U.S. economy, that it might turn out to be some history that people will look back at later and say, "Isn't it amazing that they all just sat around and allowed that?"

One of the things I really liked about this movie is the fact that all the characters, including Cromwell and King Charles, are quite sympathetic. You can see what they had in mind. It is beautifully filmed, has three-dimensional characters, and includes women, and not just as excuses to show skin. No memorable music, but you can't have everything.

One thing they left out was the knitted waistcoat that Charles wore at his execution. I don't know why they didn't include it. It had quite a nice stitch, which we now know as King Charles Brocade. I didn't knit during the movie, or even quilt, since I had a mountain of laundry to fold. And also I must go review the movie at some point, so I didn't want to have missed an important part because I had come to some complex shaping or something. I think that probably happens a lot.

Today I have a couple of workshops and a rehearsal, and I need to leave home in one hour. I should probably get dressed.

As you know, I'm not allowed to post recognizable pictures, but I think this one passes. It also shows how we spent the weekend -- playing games. This is people playing Wii.

Yeah, not much of a picture, but all the good ones had faces in them.

Catchphrase was the most popular game of the weekend, but we also played Malarky, Cranium, and Wheedle, and some members of the group played Legend of Zelda, Monkey Ball, chess, and scrabble. M. Bassoon argued fervently for Monopoly, but luckily we don't own Monopoly, so that was okay.

There was also talking, eating, and showing of photo albums. I like to look at photo albums, myself, but I hesitate to show them to people because many people famously do not like them. #2 daughter did not hesitate to show them to M. Bassoon, and he was her guest, so I guess that was okay. There were small amounts of music and television. And of course whatever the kids got up to after we oldsters went to bed.

High points of the weekend:

• The Oldest Member of the choir in his scarlet fedora.
• #2 daughter making like a rock star as song leader in the first service.
• #2 son flipping and turning in the air in gymnastics class, while I thought, "He can't have done what I just saw him do."
• Swans on the duck pond.
• The fierce concentration of #1 daughter and #1 son playing chess.
• The bliss of the dogs, since the people were all sitting around absently petting them.
• My husband cooking. 
• Far-ranging discussions.

After the guests left, I watched Flashdance and got some more of the quilting done on the table runner I started last year. Table runners normally take me about six weeks to complete. I don't know why this one has taken this long.

I enjoyed Flashdance. I saw it in the theater when it first came out, and enjoyed it then, but it has been made fun of so thoroughly since then that I almost expected not to enjoy seeing it again.

I was dancing myself when it came out, and I did not see anything salacious in the dance scenes (the strip club scene didn't really count as a dance scene), though I recall thinking that the dancing in the bar seemed too arty to be convincing. Would men in a bar actually want to watch such things? We thought not, me and the other dancers I watched the movie with. The script is fairly minimalistic, or stupid if you prefer, the heroine is a pottymouth, and the guy is quite a bit too old for her, but the dancing is still very good. I did notice, this time around, that the camera focuses quite a bit on bottoms. I assume the fact that I'm not dancing nowadays is what made this obvious to me -- but it could be #2 son' comment, "I don't think this is the kind of movie I'm supposed to watch."

Anyway, it's Monday. I'm plying The Dark Art of SEO today. I spent much of Friday analyzing our numbers and checking out our competition. Our numbers are good, though I've been able to find folks with better numbers. Our webmaster claims that we've had over 4,000 hits since Friday. With the oft-sited typical online conversion rate of 2%, we should have had 80 orders over the weekend, but we didn't. So is our conversion rate truly dismal, and if so, why? Or is our webmaster mistaken, and if so, why? This is my quest today: to answer these burning questions. Also to pack up for tomorrow's workshop.

I also have to lift the novels ban long enough to finish Lunch at the Piccadilly for book club. We're meeting on Wednesday, and I am not even halfway through.

Yesterday was a day of good food, good conversation, and further games. I took the dog for a walk down to the duck pond and around through the fake historic neighborhood, but wasn't able to rouse my family to go be tourists.

We like the guy #2 daughter brought to visit.

Does it matter whether your family likes the person you're dating? Does it matter whether that person likes your family?

On the one hand, I'm inclined to say that it does matter. Often, when your friends and family don't see the person's wonderful qualities, it is because they are not as blinded by infatuation as you are. You, having become enchanted by the sultry eyes or tinkling laugh of the beloved one, have gone right ahead and persuaded yourself that he or she is refreshingly naive, not as dumb as a post, or decided that the overall skankiness your siblings notice right away is actually an edgy daring quality that is highly attractive.

At the same time, it is often a matter of what you're used to. And there are many long-married couples whose friends and family still haven't figured out what he/she saw in him/her.

We have church today, two services since #2 daughter is singing her solo in the first service. She and M. Bassoon may not stay for the second, but I'm in the choir. I have made two different kinds of cranberry muffins for breakfast, and hope to make beef stew to put in the crockpot before I leave. I have a show this afternoon, and having lunch ready when I get home from church would be a real blessing. Bread machines and slow cookers are, I once heard it said, the modern equivalent of having servants. Of course, you do still have to get the ingredients in there, so I guess I had better go do that.

Both daughters and M. Bassoon arrived last night, and I stayed up way past my bedtime playing Catchphrase with them.

We had prepared by having haircuts, #1 son and I. The hairdressers were talking about his hair.

"It's not fair! He has such great hair!"
"If I had had like that, I'd wear it down to here!" This was said while indicating a line just below her posterior.
"Yeah! And I'd flip it!" This also had gestures.

#1 son was very gallant about the whole thing.

We also bought food. I am trying out the new season's recipes on my unsuspecting guests. I've been suspicious of the one involving cake mix and strawberry jam; I probably won't tell them what's in it before I serve it.

I hope the troops will be up for doing something touristy today, though I would certainly understand it if they mostly wanted to hang around playing games and talking. I might even add napping. But you know how it is: you don't do the touristy things until you have visitors from out of town.

It is true that this is not the best month to visit our town. However, you can't just refuse to entertain except in spring and fall.

There needs to be some music at some point, if only to prepare for tomorrow, when #2 daughter is singing a solo in church, and I hope to fit in some walking. #2 son has gymnastics, too. I am off to slice berries for almond-encrusted pastries and chop vegetables for Quiche Tartlets. It seems possible that no one will actually wake up during breakfast time, but those things ought to do for brunch as well.

Catchphrase? We won quite a lot of the time. Partly this was because #2 son didn't know what a gulag was, and wasted a lot of time thinking it was some variant on "ghoul," but partly it was as M. Bassoon said a psychic connection that allowed him to guess things like "Nanook of the North," and #1 daughter's impressive knowledge of movies.

 Yesterday's organizing of the files went on much longer than my enjoyment of it, but there is discernible improvement.

One thing that really lengthened the process was that I have apparently been coming back from workshops for the past year and dumping all the extra materials into the back of the file drawer. No doubt I have thought, each time, that I would go back and organize it all, and then just repressed the entire episode. So there was a whole lot of sorting out little frog cutouts and handouts and sentence strips and stuff, in addition to tossing ancient press releases and catalogs.

The David Allen GTD system has some useful concepts that I think I will incorporate into my life.

"Ubiquitous capture": everything that swims into your ken, be it a thought or a piece of paper, gets "captured" in "leakproof external buckets (in-baskets, email, notebooks.) I already make a point of taking those "I'd better call Sally" thoughts and writing them onto my to-do list.

But my early training in "handle a piece of paper only once" leads me to see all papers as "filed" or "not filed." If they're not filed yet, then they're making a mess in my workspace. Nothing in between. So I often have a random pile of papers I intend to use, or have brought back from another workspace (since I am a telecommuter and do shows and workshops and fairs and conferences, that happens a lot.) See the exhibit at right, my messy workspace.

How do you avoid having that "capture" bit turn into stuffing things in the back of the file drawer to be dealt with someday?

Regular processing. That means that you go to your in-box (and I guess I need one of those) and go through the following process with each piece:

Is it actionable? Meaning not that you could sue it, but that you have some action to take on it. If not, you toss it, file it for future reference, or put it in your "someday/maybe" list or folder.

If there is action to take, then is there more than one step involved? If so, consider it a project and put it into the system as one. I don't usually think of things as projects unless they have dozens of steps. In any case, you determine the next action step you would take if this were going to be done now. If the step would take 2 minutes or less, do it. Otherwise, put the next step onto the to-do list or project steps list, file the object if there is one, and move on to the next item.

So my stack of papers up there has a bread recipe my mother emailed to me. I intend to make the bread, so I printed it out, but that is definitely a multi-step process, so I post it by the counter where I make the bread, write "make bread" on my to-do list for tomorrow, and move on. Next are the Google Analytics printouts for the past two months for the store website. I need to refer to them in the future, so I file them under "website maintenance" and move on.

Clearing that mess up took me about five minutes, since I was following a step-by-step process and didn't try to do anything that would take more than two minutes. This was a distinct improvement.

It made me think about another collection point -- the sheet music basket. The eyeglasses basket is next to it, and that needs nothing done with it. We all put our glasses there, on a good day, and then we can all find them again when we need them.

The sheet music basket is something else. All the music we are currently working on is on the rail at the front of the piano. Once we have done our performances (me) or moved on to another piece (#1 son), the old music goes into the basket. My daughters still have pieces of music in the basket.

I remember how happy I was when I came up with the basket, since before that we always had a welter of sheet music all over the place. But now, we cannot find music when we want it. We think, "Don't I have a copy of that Bizet?" and empty out the whole basket and paw through everything and call each other up and say, "Do you have that Bizet piece I did three Easters ago?"

It's ridiculous. It is, I see, the consequence of capturing without processing. The messy workspace is perhaps the consequence of processing without capturing. Maybe not. Maybe I just said that for the symmetry.

I also repaired the ottoman yesterday. I had enough of the yardage to make a new cover, but since it had gotten shabby before any other things I made from the same fabric at the same time, I decided that it was a high-risk area and I didn't want to do that. Instead, I used a scrap of another of the fabrics to replace just the top of the cover. It was almost, but not quite big enough. Since I didn't want to put a lot of effort into this, I eked it out with strips of another fabric in the group instead of doing proper patchwork. I padded it, but of course didn't want to put in the time to quilt it, so I just did a little random quilting to keep the batting from shifting.

The result looks like something for which I decided not to go to too much trouble. I will therefore still have to make a new cover, using the proper yardage, but I will have to live with this for a while so I won't feel that it was a completely wasted effort.

Sigh.

I'm still reading Under a Green Sky. Look back at yesterday's post to see Dr. Ward's response to my email to him. This book is something of a detective story, as the scientists track down the causes of the mass extinctions of the past. As Lostarts pointed out, the world has cycles of climate change. About every 26 million years, the climate warms significantly and lots of species die off. We know why this is happening now (human choices), but previous occurences, being prehistoric, are more mysterious.

Last I heard, asteroids hitting the earth were the preferred explanation. However, in the 1980s, there were new discoveries and lots of thrilling controversies,and it was in the news and all.

I had babies in 1983, 1984, 1989, and 1991. I guess that is why I missed all that. I'm catching up now.

I'm having an organization day today.

While I am naturally suspicious (I mean it is my nature to be sceptical like this, not that it is natural for everyone -- so often new systems are just the same old same old with new terminology and possibly a T shirt) of new systems, downloading and reading David Allen's GTD documents have inspired me to get my filing and calendar updated. It is time anyway, and we're having bad weather.

Not that bad weather matters a whole lot to me, since I work at home, but the idea of it makes an organization day seem sensible. And you should always do tedious things when you feel inspired to do them.

Here is David Allen: "There are only two problems in life. Isn’t that nice to know? You only have two things you ever need to be concerned about. Not only are there only two problems – they are really quite simple. Ready? Problem #1: You know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it. Problem #2: You don’t know what you want. Anything you can define as a problem can be reduced to one or both of those statements."

Something interesting to think about while you file papers.

I read a bit more of Philip Dwyer's forthcoming Napoleon. Normally, I would alternate this book with a nice light novel. Napoleon is an interesting guy, but an enormous tome with footnotes and dim illustrations (do you want to see a caricature of Napoleon penned by a school mate of his? It's in there) is not a page-turner for me. So I would be refreshing my palate with a detective novel before returning to the exhaustive tale of all the evidence on the question of whether or not Napoleon was teased at school for his accent, except that I gave up novels for Lent.

So I am alternating instead with Under a Green Sky, a book on global warming by paleobiologist Peter Ward. I can't tell you anything new about global warming yet. I am too distracted by his writing style. Let me share a sentence with you:

But the pounding surf
on the rocky points
the scudding clouds
and the vast cliffs that echoed back
the crashing of waves on rock
vastly overawed these temporal nuisances
as we scrambled up and over
stratal ridge after ridge
each several-inch to several-foot
limestone layer representing 24,000 years,
the limestone alternating with darker shale
and all controlled
by orbital cycles first discovered
by a Russian named Milutin Milankovich.

It isn't laid out like that in the book, of course. But it should be. These very long sentences with minimal punctuation go on and on with a hypnotic effect, several to a paragraph, till it is very hard for me to make any sense of what the guy is saying. Here's another:

And in the center
of the back wall
of the bay
there was a meeting of
the two different units, a sudden transition
from maroon beds below
to pink and white beds
above
starting near the sea and then
rising
upward
from the base of this canyon
as the tilt
of the beds carried
this K-T boundary layer
one the year before discovered
to be packed with all the hallmarks of the K-T impact itself
the diagnostic iridium
shocked quartz
and glassy spherules,
all save the iridium originally
Mexican inhabitants that were now on permanent vacation
at this beach.

That actually isn't the end of this sentence, but I like "at this beach" for the end of the poem.

And if you think the guy is poetic about iridium and glassy spherules, you should hear him on cephalopods!

I have emailed Dr. Ward these poems. I'll let you know if he responds.

Coming back with Dr. Ward's response:

"Well, this was the best part of an otherwise execrable day (long flight from Miami).  Why don't you submit it somewhere?

I hope you are serious, I enjoyed your letter, but then I am very gullible and really tired tonight.  Our world is not getting better."

I don't talk much about politics here, probably because I talk about it a lot in real life (we need a term for that that balances between "real life" which sounds like the physical world is better and "meatspace" which is disgusting), but The Empress and I realized something yesterday that I just had to share. Since the proportion of people who vote is so small, we really have no idea what would happen if everyone voted.

All our ideas about who will win are based on the expectation that a quarter of the voters will make all the decisions. We could be amazed if that changed.

Yesterday's workshop went well, though there were more participants than expected (or paid for, or prepared for). I'm going back next week. My day at the store was otherwise uneventful, though the woman who wanted the bulletin board with glasses called back. Thanks to Mel, I was able to tell her that I knew just what she wanted,and that it isn't made any more. She wanted to know if we had an old catalog. Whether she was thinking that she could order discontinued products from an old catalog, as though it were a time machine, I do not know. We gave her the phone number of our competition. She gave me her phone number, in case we find one of these bulletin board sets in the back room some day.

I got home with just barely enough time to make dinner for my family: stir fry with pork, carrots, peppers and onions, and noodles. #1 son complained, "Do you know how long it's been since we had a balanced dinner made for us?"

My feeling is that I make a balanced dinner for them every night, but I had to admit that I had done burgers and grilled chicken sandwiches the previous two evenings. Maybe sandwiches don't count. I reminded him about Saturday's fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn.

"Where was the green vegetable?" he asked, outraged. The vegetables over the past few days have been carrots, tomatoes, corn, and cucumbers, which I would have said were respectable vegetables.

Then my husband complained to me about #1 son's being a slacker and the low standard of housekeeping chez fibermom of late. In particular, he pointed out that he has been cleaning the kitchen in the afternoons. He says he doesn't want to get onto #1 son about this, because he will get angry if he does. So I should do it.

I feel sure that you are very sorry for both these guys.

Partygirl called to tell me I was late and I dashed off for Tuesday class, admittedly pretty unconcerned about these complaints.

In Tuesday night class, we heard about God and physics, which quite surprised me. Not just because I'd recently been reading about this subject, but because the speaker -- while riveting --has never shown any indication of understanding concepts in science at all.

She had some interesting things to say about light, waves, particles, and the dual nature (human and divine) of Jesus.

So when I got home, I had been on the go pretty solidly from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. I say "pretty solidly" because The Empress and I did take time out for that political conversation, and there was a spell when the electricity went out and we all hung around waiting for the computers and lights to come back on. I was multitasking through meals, which I know is not the best practice, but it was that kind of day.

So my mind went back to something I'd heard on NPR on the way home from work. There is this time management system called Getting Things Done which is apparently all the rage among the technologically savvy. I'm pretty happy with my time management skills, and I get a lot done, but I thought I might find it refreshing to check out the new trends. I find that Wired wrote about this in 2005, so maybe it doesn't count as a new trend, but we postmodern types are not bound by time.

The central idea is that "stuff" -- things in your physical or psychological space that don't have a place yet -- is the source of stress. So you write things down, or at least type them into your computer. I already do that. And, in fact, a quick browse suggests that there is nothing new in GTD but the terminology. That is, this system isn't expected to be only in the physical world (real world, meatspace... I definitely need a better term). Where classic time management gurus talked about filing systems as though they should involve cardboard folders and drawers, the GTD folks are okay with "notional folders."

So you might find it useful, if you are suffering from "stuff." And I might continue looking at it a little bit today, in hopes that it will help my housework crisis and/or get more green vegetables on the table.

Today is my marathon music evening, and I am having lunch with Janalisa right near the grocery store, so I may go buy that boy some kohlrabi. Otherwise, I think it's another numbers day.