Category: Useful Things

Hover and Reveal

Doodle is awesome – and free!  It lets you propose and find common times to meet.  Michelle introduced me to Doodle years ago when she used it for  scheduling meetings across multiple companies.  Since then we’ve used it for picking social dates,  looking for common times.  Now our family is using Doodle for elder care scheduling,  looking to book unique times.

I learned a way to get around a missing feature: For “doodles” that span long periods of time, you lose the participant name on the side.  It lacks what Excel calls “freeze panes”, so the names scroll away.

Steve showed me this: although you can’t always see the original list of names, each name will be displayed if you hover the mouse over a booked block.

Adobe to PowerPoint in very few clicks

Hey!  I learned how to pull an Adobe document into a Powerpoint slide!  It’s so easy!

1. Open the .pdf file.

[on my version of Adobe reader, which is 9]

2. Tools > Select & Zoom > Snapshot Tool

3. Click the corners of the area you want .  This automatically copies to the clipboard and says so!

4. Paste into PowerPoint.

SCORE!

Restricting Freedom of the [Word]Press

I was happy to learn that Southwest has $5 WiFi because it would give me a great opportunity to catch up on all the lessons I have scribbled on paper or filed in email.

It’s easy connect and it’s fun to track the plane over America (crossing border from Kansas to Colorado as I type this) but when I go to WordPress.com I this:

Oops!

You are trying to view a restricted site.

Please head back and remember that, in order to provide a fast, safe WiFi environment, Southwest must restrict access to some web sites

How rude!

 

Seasoned Travelers or What?

I have no idea how many times I am going to have to learn to prepare and pack for a trip earlier than I’ve been doing.

We travel enough to know what we need (yes we have printed checklists and yes they work really well so never mind making fun of that) for a trip.  It’s the little stuff that does not have to wait for the day of or the day before the trip.  For me it was finding a quart-size ziplock bag, or transferring something out of one in use elsewhere so I could use it for the carryon liquids.  And restocking business cards.  And printing stuff to bring.  And recording a colleague’s cell phone number. And a whole bunch of other stupid stuff.  For Steve it was replacing his shoelaces.  Really?  We can’t think of this and do it ahead of time?

It’s important that we leave on time, so that we have time to go back to check to see if we actually locked the door. (Answer is yes.  Every time.)  I am not even trying to learn to change that!

 

Please Elaborate

I have learned that Facebook is not the forum for posting cryptic obscure status updates.

I wrote “Nothing’s broken” because that’s what came into my head to describe this delicious state of everything working and peaceful in my life: no crisis, nothing to fix.  To me it was reminiscent of my mom’s Yiddish-rooted “Nothing hurts me”.

But no, this was not a good idea.  I got worried comments and even a concerned phone call!  For some, this sounded like I had been in an accident, or maybe someone else had.

So I learned to be more careful with what I post.  Or at least less obscure.

 

Sock Hazard

If my late father could only read this (Or… maybe he can?  Hi Dad!  I miss you!  Look! I have a blog!)  then he would tell me that he told me so:  Never go in a workshop in your socks!

I stepped on a staple.  It was horrible.  I can’t even tell you about it, it was so bad.  But the lesson is, as my father always told me: don’t go in the workshop without shoes!

Here is another dad/sock connection for me.  It has nothing to do with this lesson.  He used to get so mad when we went outside in our socks.  He’d yell “Take off your socks or put on your shoes!”  Then one day, as an adult, I went out to get the mail in my socks when he was visiting.  I said “Oh no, you’re catching me outside in socks-without-shoes!” and he said “I don’t care, I’m not paying for them!”  It had never, once, occurred to me to find out what his specific objection was!

 

Who you callin’ “Missy”?

I learned something that really surprised me: Petite and Misses sizes are different shapes, not just different lengths, as I have always believed.   I found myself between two sizes in pants, let’s just call them x Petite and y Petite.  OK?  Thanks.   And the very-helpful salesperson at Coldwater Creek suggested that I get size x not-Petite, which she calls “Missy”.  How can that be, I wondered?  But she explained that the proportions are different all around.

So I bought them and had them hemmed (I have learned that we have a great tailor in Goffstown, at the organic cleaners!) and now I have some nice new pants that fit beautifully!  (in the smaller size, to boot, as x < y)

 

Pizza Night (part 1 & part 2)

Pizza night part 1 and 2

Sally taught me that if you forget which night is Pizza Night at the gym, you’ll be the only one who forgot!  The place is packed!  (She has learned this at least twice!)

And Gale taught me that the morning after Pizza Night at the gym is not exactly the atmosphere you may be seeking for an early morning workout.

 

Mystery Meal

This lesson brought to you by Sally:

Matt and I went out for a fancy French dinner last night. Since it was already a treat, we decided to spring for an appetizer, and ordered something that neither of us knew what it was, but it had something about plantain chips and an avocado mousse, so we thought it was worth a try.

BAD IDEA.  What we got was a chilled bowl of seafood!  It was clams, trout, calamari, and shrimp – none of which I eat and only half of which he likes.  We ate almost nothing and were kicking ourselves for not asking before ordering, until our waitress told us that she was comping our dessert to make up for our dissatisfaction.

Here, it all evened out, but the overall lesson is that being adventurous is fun, but unless you’re really up for whatever you’re served, google or ask before ordering. Those foreign words on menus can be tricky!

And btw, the French version of gnocchi is AMAZING.