Do you ever get so many tasks going at once that you become overwhelmed and get very little done?

That has been what I have encountered as of late. I have all of our Mexico pictures to catalogue, edit and publish; a task I wanted to have finished long ago. However, we had also decided that we would help out friends in Playa del Carmen that run the Peanut Pet Shelter by building them a new website. Andie and Jen devote their lives to rescuing the many stray dogs in the streets of Playa, and their shelter and they themselves depend on people donating to their registered charity to keep their dream alive. We had hoped to help them by creating a site that might increase donations and awareness to their cause. Also on my agenda is this site; both my blog and the plans we have for PlayaParadise.

The end result of it all was that nothing was getting done. After work, I do like a bit of down time before I start in on the necessary tasks. Once it was time to do these tasks, I would end up working on each a little, never accomplishing anything because each would only get partially done. I have numerous half written blog posts. I have some of the photos almost done. Add to that what seems like an endless stream of all sorts of unplanned items, such as relatives computers that needed to be fixed, trips to the dentist and wedding present/card/clothing shopping. When I would try and continue one of the partially completed tasks, I would waste a lot of time just trying to figure out where I had been before. Beating myself up about being behind on all my tasks was making it even harder to get motivated on any of them.

I had to find a solution, and I feel that i have done so. To start, a big item is now off the plate. Andie and Jen let us know that a professional publicity company has started designing website for them. They were quite embarrassed and apologetic; apparently they did not even know this had been started, but in reality it was sort of a relief considering that we’ve been constantly behind as of late.

In order to get other things done, I am going to apply some time management techniques to the tasks. Nothing to fancy, but simply I will do a blog post each time I complete a half day of pictures. By following this schedule, I’ll remove the pressure I placed on myself that was resulting in me getting nothing done.

So look for both regular posting to return, and pictures of our favourite place.  Once the pictures are finished, we’ll start with our revamp of the main page, as the plans rely on the pictures.

In the meantime, you can read about Karin’s adventures that added to our dentist trips.  Be sure to read all the posts that followed.

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This post is for those bloggers out there that don’t read all the various posts from the WordPress team that can be found in your dashboard, but rather wait for a notice at the top telling you it’s time to upgrade. WordPress 2.5, which is considered a major milestone, was released a few hours ago, though there is no upgrade notice yet. If you want to upgrade, got to the WordPress download site.

I have been reading information as the betas and release candidate were made public, and I understand that due to this being a major upgrade, there may be plugins that do not work, more work to do the upgrade, etc. We are heading out for the evening, but I will work on upgrading later tonight or tomorrow, and will report on the difficulty.

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Ok, so this guy is a reporter, not a postal carrier; but you still have to admire how he does not let the perils of a Canadian winter stop him from finishing his report.

That’s dedication!

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The weekend is finally here, but that just means I switch from doing someone else’s necessary work to doing my own. I really do need some undisturbed time to begin posting the Mexico pictures. I’ve learned a lot in the past couple of months about how I could make my digital pictures better; stuff I wished I’d known before our trip. That will be the stuff of future posts.

photo credit: Jeffery Simpson

But to start the weekend, we’re going across the border to Bellingham. Karin has been trying to find jeans for some time up here now, and it seems that as she gets slimmer it’s getting harder to find any without going into the range of ridiculous. Neither of us is willing to pay $100 or more for jeans. So we’ll head down for some US shopping as that will give us cheaper prices and brands that we don’t get up here. We’ve done a few trips already in the past year, but it still seems strange to do US shopping trips; those are something from my youth and until the recent exchange rate changes we didnt’ even purchase items when visiting my grandparents in Idaho. But it’s finally worth going again, and even worth buying things mail order.

Speaking of which, I got a new GPS logger last week. It’s the same model as before, a RoyalTek 2300, as I managed to ruin the first one on our trip. I’ll give more details later, but suffice to say that I found that model to be very good for geotagging purposes and so I ordered the same one, had it shipped to Sumas, and ran across the border last weekend to pick it up. I’m now getting numerous enquires from people on Flickr since I made a comment about this model, and so I’ll take along the logger and my camera today and hopefully will get a chance between stores to shoot a few pictures and be able to post quickly about it to satisfy people’s curiosity.

I’m off now, we’re going to cross the border before the line-ups form and eat an American breakfast. I’m trying to convince Karin that we should have Mexican for dinner.

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