How to Streamline Your Computer Desktop

In no time at all my computer desktop, even though I have a big screen, gets cluttered and disorganized with files, shortcuts, and things I have pinned. It bothers me. I haven’t found a really great way to fix it and tidy it up. Keeping everything really isn’t a long term solution, but it works short term.

It is easy to make folders you can keep on your desktop for moving files into. Label them with whatever works for you: House, Bills, Family Photos, Work, etc.

You create a new folder by right clicking your mouse. Then find “new” and click on “folder”. Very easy. I doubt it is any more complicated with other operating systems, like a Mac.

Once you have folders you use your mouse to drag and drop files into the folders. Put your mouse on the file/image/shortcut, hold it down rather than clicking to open the file. If it opens just close it again and try again. Once you have a hold on it, move it to the folder you want it in and let it go. It does need to be fairly centred on the folder or it will just move to beside the folder. The folder will have a halo/ highlight when the file is in range to drop. So it isn’t tricky, once you get used to it.

You can make folders inside of folders. Same process to create a new folder. So you can sort everything into smaller topics/categories inside each main folder.

Important to note – Having all these things on your main desktop will slow things down. Unless it is something you use everyday, or often, move all these folders off the main desktop and into Documents or Pictures which already exist in Windows. You can use the File Explorer or just drag and drop your files and folders into the existing Documents or Pictures folders. using File Explorer you can create new folders also.

You can have all your files and folders just as you want to use them, without taking up space or bandwidth on your computer desktop.

Eventually you should clean up all the files and folders. There will be things you no longer need, those are easiest to choose to delete.

Delete any file by right clicking and choosing “delete”. You may have a long list of options but delete will be there.

Once your desktop is cleaned up think about adding a new wallpaper. There are an endless supply and variety of them online.

Cleaning Up Your Website For Yourself and Readers

I routinely get rid of plugins and themes I’m not using. At this point I only use GeneratePress, so dealing with themes is as simple as not doing anything, I just have one theme and it updates itself.

If you have found one theme you like working with, get rid of the rest. Including the WordPress default themes. If you are not using them, don’t keep them hanging around asking to be updated for no reason. If you ever do want to go back to one of them, or use it to test your site, you can just download one again. I did this when I had an error and wanted to be sure it was nothing to do with my theme. It wasn’t.

Don’t keep plugins around for cosmetic reasons, in case you decide to use it later, or give it another try. Even dormant, deactivated plugins can cause errors on your site. Just make a note of the plugin name (or have a test site you can leave stuff like extra plugins) and delete it from your working/ active site.

If you have any plugins which are not automatically updated, get the newest file and update them. I have some plugins which I did not get through the WordPress plugin directory, some of those need to be manually updated. Plugins I like using with ClassicPress I update from files on GitHub. Plugins I have paid for I download from the developer’s site.

Most of the steps to clean up your site are simple. Get rid of the unnecessary clutter like:

old post revisions
tags you don’t use (or merge them with tags you make more use of)
pages no longer used (some may have been created by plugins)
comment spam you’ve been ignoring
user profiles which aren’t in use (update your own)
broken links in posts, resource lists, or bookmarks
image and media files not attached to anything (or not being used as headers, banners, etc.).
generic/default content from the theme you are using
plugins and themes (as I wrote above)

You can also clean up your database. Some plugins which tackle this also go through old post revisions and comment spam. Read the instructions and always backup your site before using a plugin to clean it. It is so much easier to delete the backup file you don’t need than to regret not having one while fixing the damage later. If in doubt, talk to your web host. See what they recommend.

The Broken Link Checker plugin does a really great job of finding broken links (including broken image file links) and helping you fix them.

Cleaning Up Posts

Cleaning up posts is a much bigger job to tackle. It will help if you have already done all the other cleaning first. That will help you find broken things and fix them or choose not to keep them. So some of your post clean up is already done.

My site isn’t for business, commercial or marketing so I don’t need to focus on a big post clean up to impress Google, or any other service. I clean up posts for human readers. I don’t mind to keep old posts around. Even the outdated content is an archive of things I have seen and done.

I am going through and updating links, or unlinking the original site if I can’t find another option. It’s fun and sad to see which sites I remember and which are still online. I get sidetracked trying to find people who used to run the sites and see what they are doing now.

I do have broken image files, a lot of them. I moved and merged my sites together. I’ve been slowly cleaning up which means finding old images on my hard drive or making new images to replace those I can’t find. I’m far from done. If you have moved things around chances are you have a trail of broken links and images too.

Also, posts I planned to write but have left as draft or pending posts. After sitting in pending awhile the original post you had linked to or gotten the idea from may be gone. Or, the idea has lost its importance, relevance, or inspiration for you. If you haven’t published something in there after a year you have moved on from it or have plenty of other fresher content and ideas to keep you busy.

This is a list online, no doubt there are others. I’d add to the point about similar content and say that you could link all the related posts instead of merging or out right deleting them. Turn them into a series of posts with an index linking all the relevant posts at the bottom (or top) of each post.

Content that is out of date or irrelevant now and needs to be deleted.

Information that needs to be updated (in particular, check your About and Contact pages).

Poor-quality content that’s better off removed or replaced.

Content that is too similar (for instance, if you have two posts on identical subjects, you may want to only keep the best one).

Source: Complete Guide to Cleaning Up Your WordPress Website – DreamHost

Celebrate the end of the clean up, especially if you had a lot of clean up to do.

Keep the clean up in mind as you publish and maintain your site. Not everything has to wait for a once a year cleaning. Maintain as you go along.

How to be a Better Hoarder

It starts out small. You don’t suspect at all. One day you just have a bit more stuff than space, more stuff than time or energy. So you make a pile of it. Maybe on the seat of a chair, a stack on a shelf, a junk drawer in the kitchen or a few things tossed on your bed while you tidy up the rest of the room.

Hoarding comes along easy.

That pile of stuff on the chair doesn’t get dealt with and next time you want to use the chair the stuff is in the way. A minor annoyance so you stash it somewhere else. A temporary fix, right?

Sometimes you may get caught up and avoid the start of a hoard. Usually you don’t. I don’t. I have a stash of unfinished work on nearly every surface available in my bedroom, most of the floor space is taken up with bags of stuff to do.

The rest of the house is tidy. Right now. I don’t live alone half the year. But, that’s part of the problem too. She is a clutter freak. Anything left out bothers her. I like having my coffee pot and the coffee grinder out on the kitchen counter. Why not, I use them every day at least once. I clean up any spilled coffee grounds or drips from the pot. There is no mess, just two pieces of kitchen gadgets out in open space. It took time but I’m now allowed to have them out.

Anything else I want to keep much be stashed away. This means adding it to the other stashes, stacks and piles of stuff in my bedroom. Stuff gets lost in there. It is a jungle or piles and stacks and stashes of assorted stuff I need or at least don’t want to have taken, thrown out or lost.

Ironic that I keep things here to avoid losing them when I’ve long gotten past the point of being able to keep track and find much any more.

Hoarding happens when you need to hold on to things and run out of better options, or space.

Don’t think this is taking the easy way out. Living this way is frustrating, for me more than anyone else. They may think whatever they like and they believe the problem is me. It is and yet it isn’t just me.

A lot of the stuff here are things other people want me to do for them. Tasks and jobs and demands I have not found time or energy to do. Do you know the old joke about a round tuit? Look that one up and if you ever do find that legendary round tuit please send it to me when you’re done tuiting.

I need to say no but that isn’t so simple. I won’t get into all of that. It’s an exercise in frustration to explain my need to be perfect and fix everything, do too much and prove myself to anyone who isn’t inside my own head. So, just know that it is very hard for me to say no to family and friends who ask for simple, small favours. I add their photos, their lists and assorted other things to my hoard of to-do.

I don’t think anyone outside of hoarders can understand the pressure of having too much stuff around them. It weighs on you, it pushes against you and it limits you mentally, emotionally and physically too. I hate having just a small path trough my bedroom from the door to the bed with the computer desk being along that same path. I can’t put my clean clothes away because I can’t reach the closet. I can’t start tidying up because I no longer know where to begin. It’s all a chain. One thing leads to another and another. To pull one string means pulling another and finding a place to put the first string before I can pull the next string. But, there is no more room to put anything.

In frustration I toss a pile of papers and old photos onto another stack of papers piled up on the floor. Another task demanded and no time or energy to do it. Another weight added to the pressure. Another layer added to the stuff I already can’t deal with! It lands atop the other stuff and I’m angry because this was demanded of me and I know I can’t do more and this is just more of more.

People think a hoarder is an awful thing: dirty, miserable, derelict. I’m not any of those things. Not ever miserable. I live my life around this hoard and I try to function in spite of it all. I can’t let go and give up the things in this hoard which I actually value. I can’t give up on the things I said I would do, even the things I never actually agreed to do. I feel pressure and guilt and anger.

A simple solution is to deal with some small part of it each day.

Seems simple enough. Until you start somewhere and get caught up in one thing for too long. One thing leads to another problem when you don’t have enough space to work in. Too many things are buried and it is frustrating to know they are there but out of reach. To begin finding what I need causes the moving of the hoard which means the things which were on top (the things I could locate) will now be moved and become the things I can’t find.

Hoarding is a trap.

During half the year when I live here alone I take a few days and then begin moving things out of my space and into another spare room. I get some clearance, some room to move and work. At first the release of having space and feeling hope again is just nice in itself. I haven’t thrown anything away but I have space again. Having space makes me feel I have some control, and can actually do something about all of it.

I make some progress. The hard part is choosing where and what to start on. Last time I began with clothes. I sorted out a lot of clothes I haven’t worn in years and those which I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing now that I’m no longer 20-something. I had them all ready to go to the Salvation Army thrift store. I felt good thinking some other woman would be able to wear those clothes. But, I got caught up in road blocks.

I was stopped from giving away the clothes because other people thought I shouldn’t just give them away. You can’t just give away something that still has value! Some day you may fit into that again. That dress used to look so great on you.

Isn’t that funny? I thought I was the hoarder.

I originally wrote this for Medium but no one is reading it there so I have moved it here.

Rubber Ducks are Spooky Too

The typical rubber duck is yellow, squeaky and cuddly (according to Sesame Street). Halloween rubber ducks look a little spooky. I’d expect some misbehaviour, some tricks and not so many treats.

You may not want to take these rubber ducks into the bath tub with you. Sure they can swim around on the water but, can you trust them? After all, Halloween is not the holiday for good will, jolliness and the eating of large birds. It is quite possible the rubber ducks are not going to be the standard nice ducks, happy to decorate your room and wait for bath time.

That duck wearing the black cat costume, well, it looks like it ate the original yellow rubber duckie. The skeleton wearing duck looks far more like a pirate than a Trick-or-Treater. I’m not sure what the orange guy with the fangs actually is, but I have some theories. The vampire in the sailor suit tries to look non-threatening, even cute. Of course, that’s the one I trust the least. I like the Jack-O-lantern, but I suspect she is actually the leader of the group and the rest are squeaky minions.

Halloween rubber ducks Beware the Rubber Ducks of Halloween:

Don’t feed your rubber duckie. If these rubber ducks grow any bigger or spookier you will have to build them an outdoor pond – to say the least.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy a few rubber ducks for Halloween. If you display them at the doors and windows they can scare away all the other little monsters that come out at Halloween. (Except of course, those little monsters related to you).

ducknote Below in this post you can see another rival gang of Halloween rubber ducks. These characters have to be sold separately, it’s not a money thing or a packaging thing. It’s the element of danger.

If a few rubber ducks don’t scare you… why not get a few more?

You can tuck them all away in a strong box at night. Lock it up tight. That way you won’t have to keep one eye open all night… checking for rubber ducks.

The best thing about rubber ducks is not having to clean up after them. They don’t eat, they might squeak a little but they can be great listeners. As a bonus, Halloween rubber ducks will share their candy (once you give it to them.)

If you were looking for a good pet this Halloween, consider a rubber duck. These guys come already dressed up for the occasion.

How to Write a Babysitting Resume

How to Start your own Babysitting Business and Write a Babysitting Resume

Babysitting is a good way to make some extra money and help out a family in your community too. Babysitters can be young people or anyone with some experience who has time in the evening, on weekends and so on.

You don’t need to be a big brother or sister to get some experience as a babysitter. Ask at the school and local library, those are places where you can volunteer and pick up experience helping with children. You can spend an hour reading to younger children at school or library or any other place you find out about yourself.

It will help if you have some first aid training but it is also good to mention you do have adult back up if you run into a problem (if you aren’t already an adult yourself).

Start the resume with an introduction to yourself. Give your name, age, address, how long you have lived in the area and who your references are. These would not be part of a standard resume but this is not standard. You are applying to look after someone’s children so you put the first concerns they would have at the top of your resume. A young person could mention the school they are attending and a sentence about future plans. (If you turn out to be a good babysitter they will like to know how long you are going to be available in the area, or whether you will be moving on to university in the next year). Don’t forget contact information: phone number and email address.

List your qualifications. Do you have first aid training, have you taken lifeguard training at the local pool, did you take a babysitting course, do you have younger brothers and sisters you have taken care of, have you looked after babies (infants or toddlers), have you been babysitting for other families, are you in any groups like Brownies or Girl Guides, have you volunteered for community events and projects where you may have helped set things up or done the clean up. Take a little time to think about things you have done. Even working within the community at events is a good thing, whether or not there were children involved.

List work experience, if you have it. This is also good because parents will need to know your schedule, when you are available. If you have had a regular schedule for a job in the past (or currently) you can show your reliability.

List your special skills or limitations. What ages of children can you look after? If you have experience with infants, say so. If you can’t babysit past midnight, let people know on your resume. Are you allergic to animals, then you won’t be too eager to babysit at a house with a lot of dogs, cats, birds, etc. If you can cook, then you could mention being able to make dinner and clean up afterwards. Can you help children with their homework? Do you have something fun you like to do with the kids in between dinner and bedtime? Are you able to transport children (if needed), on the bus, or in your own vehicle with child seats?

What do you need when you babysit? You may want to do homework once the kids are put to bed, so you need a place to work. You could also mention pets here, especially if you have allergies or asthma or are just uncomfortable with pets or exotic pets like a rat. If there food for making a snack for the children or yourself later in the evening? Will you need a ride home at the end of the job? How much advance notice do you need?

What are your babysitting rates? Include any extra you charge for later evenings, holidays, etc.

End the resume with a summary. Sum up the best assets you have written about above and give your contact information again.

Spring… So Far

I’m making scalloped potatoes tonight. I looked at a few recipes to get the general idea so I wouldn’t have them too wet or dry. Didn’t really reach a consensus on that so I went for the DIY plan. I added a can of Green Pea soup, mainly because it was too sweet tasting to have as soup on it’s own. It might be great mixed with milk and potatoes and some preserved garlic. Salt and pepper too. I thought about cheese but I haven’t used it in awhile and, of course, it’s gotten greenish. Why does that modern cheese that looks and tastes more like plastic than cheese, get mouldy?

So the dinner (scalloped potatoes) are in the oven. Should be about an hour of cooking time. I will give them a few check points along the way. It will be a real massive mess to clean up if that milk cooks up and floods out inside the oven. I’ve got it covered with silver foil. Some said to cover it and some said not to. I decided to cover it based on the lack of plastic cheese on top.

Graham phoned to remind me he is coming out tomorrow. Which I knew. He asked me to remind him cause he is getting the snow tires off the car and then he wants to help clean the house around before Mother comes home. She is leaving on Wednesday she said today in email or Facebook, one or the other. I have let the cleaning slide a bit. Mainly because I really just don’t like it. There are a lot of tomorrows if you keep waiting for tomorrow. But, it’s not terrible. I do live here after all. I’ve got the kitchen and bathroom cleaned. The only things I’ve left are dusting related. Clutter too, but I’ll swoop up everything tonight.

I’ve got the nice box the new computer came in and I will be able to pile a lot in there and closet it away. I wish I had gotten more done this winter, as far as the clutter. If I really got through most of it I’d likely be dumping more out than I’d keep. I can’t just dump it out without checking it though. All those bags are cases of closet tidying – times I’ve stuffed everything into a bag even though some of it is important. There is just too much paperwork to deal with in the modern world.

I almost forgot… it’s raining a slushy snow out there and has been all day. But, I have to go out and rescue Mom’s damn plants. Graham put them all outside a few days ago. Mom said to do it. I said not to. I said it was still not warm enough and there was a good chance they would all be zapped. But, Graham put them out there anyway. He has a clutter phobia I think. Not an actual phobia but as close as you can get to an actual fear without really having a phobia. Anyway, now I’m the one who has to go out into the cold rain and find something in the garage (not my favourite place) to cover the damned plants. I know she is going to tell me most of them are dead again this year. It sounds evil to wish death on plants but I almost do. All winter they fill the laundry room and then in spring I’m the plant murderer, no matter what I do or don’t do.

Anyway, everyone has their thing. My Mom’s thing is plants. So, I do water them and I don’t whack them out of the way over winter. Even in Spring when they start growing and do start getting in the way. It’s not the plants fault. They just grow where they’re put.