While doing errands this morning in the bitter cold, the ideas going through my head were the different items I want to service on my car. It frustrates me to no end that I slacked on keeping the wheels clean over the past 4 years and because of that, brake dust has become caked on.

I look under the hood and there’s definitely surface rust on strut bolts and my air horns need to be polished and other items need a coat of armor all. These little things irk me. To add to it, my hood has some chips (8 years of highway commuting, it’s a miracle it’s not worse) and this past fall an acorn tree did some dent damage.

I want to bring my wonderful 8 year old vehicle back to new. Ok, well maybe not brand new, but looking good and feeling tight again. Of course this will take some money and definitely time on my part.

This got me thinking about how much my father’s meticulous attention to detail and care for all items in our home has carried on to me. When I was younger this was a bit insanely stressful. I was always in fear of things not looking exactlyas how I borrowed them.

All of this led me to realize, I am willing to take ridiculous measures to keep things looking new, in pristine shape and thus the ability to last a long time, except my own body. Most celebrities musicians or actors have to treat their bodies as a product, because it is for their professions. I have never really looked at mine like this, instead it was the one item hindering me from just getting things I wanted to get done. Ironically enough, my thought process has been more of a, “When is someone coming to take care of this thing”.

That thing is my own body, so no one else, other than me is going to be taking care of it. For most people this is pretty obvious, but I’ve spent the last 10+ years doing most of my living in my head; reading, studying, creating, analyzing, philosophising. Much like my car, with time and money it is possible to restore my body to a better state, looking “new” again.

I’m toying with the idea of forwarding my .Mac/.Me email account to my GMail account. The reason being is I’m getting a lot more email into the .Mac account it’s getting kind of hard to keep up with it via Mail. I’ve got a good system of organization but I’m duplicating between my GMail account and the .Mac account. It seems crazy when the content coming in overlaps so much.

The other reason behind the move is, I’m really not impressed with the MobileMe website. It never fails, I delete things over there and it doesn’t move it. Also I find their website very slow, no matter what browser I’m using.

My third reason is I’m not as tethered/addicted to getting my emails instantly. I love the .Me push IMAP, but really I don’t have anything coming in that a search 15 minutes from now won’t catch.

Recently GMail left Beta, offered Offline options (yay!) and now offers a slew of Labs extras, like Undo Send.

I have also since setup GoogleApps for my personal domain, which is doing a wonderful job filtering out an incredible amount of spam, from two email accounts Craig and I have had since 1999.

My only hesitation is that I’ve always ran into issues getting iCal notifications to play nice with my GMail account and really that could be eliminated by going to Google Calendar.

Question to the community:

Have you been in this dilemna? Which way did you decide? Any issues I’m not considering?

A few months ago, I took advantage of the local yarn store’s closing sale. When I got home with my bounty of yarn, I stuffed a few of balls of yarn into a plastic storage bin in my office. Problem was, the bin wasn’t big enough for all of it.

This weekend we did a major cleaning and overhaul of my office. I finally made it through several boxes that had been stalking me for years. When we were done, I turned around to see the coffee table empty inside and the lightbulb went off to put the yarn in there. It all fit, looks wonderful and when I want some, all I have to do is grab a suction cup, pull up the glass and take out the one piece.

Spaces @ Work, originally uploaded by criana.

I love the new Spaces feature in Leopard, aka Apple OS 10.5.

1) Lotus Notes
2) VMWare Fusion
3) iTunes
4) Apple Mail, Safari and iChat

I’ve gotten pretty quick with using the keyboard shortcuts to jump around screen.

[Update: I stopped using Spaces while at work, it became more of a pain to remember which window had what folder view open and having to move back and forth. I might revisit this in the future with a more concrete plan for each space]