It keeps getting ahead of me. Blame it on ‘tis-the-season. Soon I will launch a new campaign, a new-old way of dealing with an old-new problem.

Way back in My Other Life, I coped with a full diaper pail, a fixture in the bathroom for ten years. That’s when I began to say “Today is not forever, it just feels like it”. You may have heard me say/write that. That’s when I read Management in the Home (Doddd,Mead & Company, 1959) by Lillian Gilbreth (1872-1972), the American industrral engineer who with her husband wrote Cheaper by the Dozen (made into a movie, 1952) about raising all those children and still having a life (as they say), thanks to her expertise. Even then I was trying to find enough time and energy to write in my spare time of which I had none. I developed habits then that served me well. I still use Gilbreth’s methods - and Julia Child’s - of time and motion in the kitchen and elsewhere, (though I have never mastered the discipline of mending). I took the idea of hanging a lot of kitchen tools in plain sight and within easy reach from Child’s husband, Paul, and from Gilbreth of duplicating frequently used items in another adjacent area.

I had my own little routines and codes. One I still remember: BDT. I had mastered (?) the art of lists by then and I tried to condense the daily chores to codes, to be dealt with asap so I could get on with the rest of the daily demands. So BDT was short for Beds, Dishes, Tidy. This was before dishwashers - not before dishwashers but before I had a dishwasher - and before Betty Friedan (The Feminist Mystique, 1953) pointed out that anyone over the age of 6 could make a bed. My rule with my husband became last-one-out-of-bed makes it. Once the basics were done I could get on with the rest of the daily, weekly, inexorable chores. I won’t go into any more detail.

One day when I was walking around the house taking notes on where I could apply Gilbreth’s directives, my friend Judy dropped in and looked at me in shock (?) when I explained what I was doing.

“You mean” she said,” you are using your spare time to look for ways to discover how you can develop spare time?”

“And energy,” I added.

She shook her head in wonder.

Yup.

Still looking after all these years.

It’s hard for me to believe: i’m back, almost without scars, almost clear-eyed (but NOT bushy-tailed), and I finally broke into my blog. Did you miss me? I’m sure that every computer user encounters problems every day, some small, others bigger, like, BIGGER. Where/when did I ever leave you? Three days? Not by choice. My cursor froze, then the screen went blank and i was braced for the sad news: my computer was toast. (That’s a technical term, meaning it didn’t work.) But then, when the new computer was delivered, courtesy of Jennifer, my guru and Guardian Angel of computers, the dear little NEW ONE had trouble adjusting to the new website and demanded the password of the system.

More to come…I hope. I’ve put in a request for yet another magic password and the Wizard of WiFi will be telling me what I need to know.

Some day I’m going to to write about passwords. Does anyone else have trouble with them? Not with them, but with one’s own ability and retention. And I’m not always too sure of my various contacts’ retention. Just when I’ve done everything right they get huffy and forbid me access. I’m still me but they aren’t.