The next section is the true heavy-hitter: “debts“. Displaying my debt numbers as they slowly roll down to zero was HUD’s original raison d’etre.

I find it gauche to discuss the naked specifics of one’s finances in a public conversation, so I simply label the debts “1″ to “4″. The main thing to know about them is that they’re all going *down*. If all goes well, debt 1 (my oldest) will be payed-off by the end of the summer and debt 4 (my newest) will be blanked by year’s end. The other two amount to about 8 grand, 5 grand of which is tied-up in “debt 3″, a 15-year low interest student loan.

So why are these debts such a big deal to me? Just this: as you may recall, 4 years ago I put a five-year plan in motion. The plan was to move from Phoenix AZ to the Pacific NW, and find a town that I loved so much that I’d want to spend half-a-decade there and put down roots. A place where I could find a satisfying job or two, work hard, make friends, live on the cheap, and become debt-free & fully self-reliant by age 30. Bellingham WA turned out to be that town, and I truly do love it here more & more every year.

The rest of that plan is going great. I’ll be 29 this December, and turn 30 in December ‘11. While I’ll likely be carrying around that student loan for a few more years to come, by this time next year the amount of my budget set aside for debt payments will go from $350/mon (right now) to $30/mon next summer.

To me, that’s huge. That spells the difference between having to continue living in the same town (however nice it may be) and continue doing the same steady full-time, well-paying job or else face bankruptcy… or having the freedom to packup a backpack w/ a few essentials, lace up my hiking boots and travel anywhere in the world, for any length of time. Granted the former is okay. But the latter has been my own private dream practically since the time I was first old enough to lace my own shoes.

Those debt numbers represent, in my mind, the actual physical distance between me and one of my biggest, burliest long-term goals. It’s one of the reasons why I think posting the thing on a site called “Dreamwidth” seems doubly appropriate.

Anyway, that’s that. I’m sure you’re all sick of hearing me crow endlessly about debt-reduction. I admit I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with those four numbers. Putting them on HUD helps me push them out of my head and down onto a few clean lines of text, where they seem far less immutable and scary.

Next time, I’ll move on to the less serious stuff & talk about the next section, which is all about my hobbies. See yah then.

First though, let me mention that by the end of September I’ll likely be back to a normal American 5-on-2-off work schedule. The “marathon summer” approach is a short-term fix only, something I’ve decided to do entirely for economic reasons. My sincere hope is that, work-wise, I’ll never have another summer like this again. It’s working pretty much how I planned it, but it’s not a method I particularly endorse. (Instead, I just give this advice: if you ever get into debt, work as hard as you can to pay it off fast, using whichever method works best for you.)

The main reason I can work a no-weekends schedule is because I’m pretty good at managing fatigue. “Fatigue management” is, essentially, knowing when it’s okay to let yrself slack-off. And here’s a secret, friends: The answer is usually “more than you think”.

Like right now, for instance.

I guess what I’m driving at is: I’m tired & distracted tonight and my solution for that is not “powering through it”. That may work for some people, but for me the prescription is an hour of unfocused goofing-around, then sleep. With luck, that remedy will work & I’ll be back & more lucid tomorrow.

The next section is what I think of as my daily “score”. On a less abstract level, these four lines let me quantify how I’m doing on four basic ongoing goals: “1) Remember to take care of myself & my daily business. 2) Keep my inbox clear. 3) Keep my finances positive. 4) Remember to water my herbs.” Since forgetfulness, communication shortcomings, budget concerns, and straight-up slackerdom are my four big weaknesses in life, these four numbers are a decent indicator of how my day is going.

The first line is “checklist items:“. This is the output of my basic daily todo-list system.

Two of the five essential items I have in my pockets at all times are a spiral-top pocket memo book and a pencil. I like spiral-tops because they’re double sided. I keep my to-do list on the top page of one side, and flip it over to scrawl random notes on the back side. Plus, they sit better in a pocket than the spiral-side kind.

Here’s a quick rundown of my checklist system. (If you’re the tl;dr type, just skip this paragraph, but I know there are other [lifehacker]-type folks out there that get switched-on by this kind of thing.) I separate tasks into only three categories. “new” items are things I just wrote down today. Every morning, I copy over all the “new” items on to a fresh page and write a number in front of it (generally 7 or 14): that’s the number of days I plan to keep the task alive. If an “old” item stays on my to-do list for days, I copy it over again and again, decrementing the number each time. When an item reaches 0, it’s “expiring”– if I don’t cross off an expiring item by the end of the day, I just erase it. (Erasing an expired task is a tough thing to do, psychologically. It generally means admitting that I dropped the ball on something. But taking that hit and getting closure is much preferable to dragging around a todo list of months-old crap. Took me a long time to learn that.)

The memo books I use have 15 lines on a page, so I try to keep the list capped at 15 items max. Yet another good reason to keep your todo list on paper instead of a PDA.

The next line is “inbox:“, followed by a number. My goal is for this number to always be zero. (see [this lecture by Merlin Mann] for a good explanation of what “Inbox Zero” is about.)

The key addition for me is that “Inbox” is an umbrella concept that *includes* my Gmail inbox, but also encompasses all the other ways that people use to communicate me– voice mail, real mail, RSS feeds, Facebook, and all that. It’s the whole ball of string. I try to process (again, see above vid for what I mean by “process”) and respond to *everything* that hits my Inbox within 24 hours. Sometimes I slip. (In fact, I slip a lot.) But if you have a good mental system for processing your ‘box– and I think my system is pretty good– it’s hard to get too far lost.

If the number is higher than zero, it means I have stuff in my Inbox that I’d like to respond to, but haven’t got to yet. If *you* left me a message and my Inbox isn’t zero, then it’s likely yours is sitting right there. To quote [jessicapierce]: Please be patient, I am only a donkey.

The next line is “budget:“. I definitely don’t want to unpack my entire budget process right here either (though, yeah man, I’m proud of my budgeting method too). The main thing to know is that I consider my budget to have only three states: “green”, “black”, and “red”. I update it about once a week.

“Green” means that my savings account is going up. “Black” means that I’m on budget, but haven’t yet met my savings goal for the month. “Red” means that my savings are going down because I’ve gone over-budget. (note: “red” doesn’t mean that I’m broke, just losing money. So don’t panic. I have savings. Right now, “green” means I’m saving 15% of my income straight off the top.)

And the last one is a simple boolean. “checked herbs?“, yes or no. Because I am constantly forgetting to water the potted herbs on our back porch, and if you forget to water them on hot day they get toasted.

So that’s it for that. There’s still 6 blocks to go. I’ll keep going tomorrow.

So, HUD. [Heads-Up Display] is the organization method I use to keep my life moving. It’s my dashboard. I used to keep this kind of thing in a notebook or on a corkboard, but tossing it up on a blog just works better. It’s already become a productive habit.

Like a dashboard, it’s just a bunch of numbers and gauges of varying obscurity. Even if it’s obvious what an item measures, it may not be particularly obvious why I care about a particular number. I’ll try to answer that broader question as I go. Here’s an explanation of each, from top to bottom:

The first item is “Rad thing du jour“. A short answer question: What was the raddest thing you saw today? Phrase your answer in the form of a URL.

Posting this helps me think back and compartmentalize all the wonderful, fun and important things that I see on the daily, both online and off. I don’t think I’m boasting to say that I find the world we live in to be freaking amazing. We are awash in wonders every single day. “Rad” (as in “radical”) is my favorite word to describe this kind of thing.

I put this right at the top of the page, as a sort of antidote to all the boring crap beneath it.

Next, “flour milled“: This is the amount of flour that I personally produced that day. I’m the miller’s assistant at an independent, organic flour mill. Flour is my stock & trade. It’s the main way that I pay my bills & make a living. (I don’t get paid by the pound or anything; I just enjoying having the number to look back on at the end of the day.)

We sell flour in bulk (25- or 50-pound bags) and in cases of two-, five-, or eight-pound bags (a case weighs about 30 or 40 lbs). We have 13 different varieties of flour, so I sometimes use abbreviations. “UBW” is Unbleached White Flour, “WW Stone” is Stoneground Whole Wheat, “BW” is Buckwheat, etc.

For some perspective, 1 pound of flour = 1 loaf of bread. I generally mill 3000 to 5000 lbs of flour every day (Mon-Fri), enough to feed a few thousand people.

(continued tomorrow)

Every day I come home tired– typically *happy* and tired, mind you, and very rarely feeling exhausted, but when I’m tired the first thing to sail out the window is my ability or desire to type a creative sentence.

Related paragraph: I received a package(!) today from my aunt & uncle in Michigan that held a freshly-sealed jar of blackberry jam and a pocket knife, both very appreciated, especially the beautiful jam (To Jerry & Sue: Thanks!). In one part of the letter that came with it, my uncle wrote “I try to understand your Facebook and Beyond Metamora updates but I’m a bit out of touch with the lingo.” Which tells me that I should probably try to do more explicatin’.

To that end, I’ve cleared off the rest of my afternoon (ie post-gardening) schedule this weekend so that I can spend some time offloading some text, however poorly or tiredly, about the oh-by-the-way rocking good times that I’ve been enjoying this summer.

First, I should start off by doing a much-needed “Hey, WTF is this?” post about my Dreamwidth journal, [Heads-Up Display]. Other than the occasional blip on [Twitter], HUD is the only thing online that I’ve been updating regularly. Updates to that site are written in my wonky shorthand and– I cannot stress this enough– probably of limited interest to anyone other than me. But explicating HUD provides a useful window into what I’m actually up to this summer, and what I’m trying to accomplish.

After that, I’ll write a bit more about milling and gardening– ie the things I do for a living– and a bit about the hobbies I mess with in my leisure hours. Finally, I’ve got some fairly important and substantial news to share about what I plan to be doing next summer & beyond.

(*ding* part 1 done. barring calamity, look for part 2 tomorrow)

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping a very minimalist “daily dashboard” blog over on Dreamwidth. It’s called “Heads-Up Display”. You may want to have a look:
http://mwkelley.dreamwidth.org

( or plug this link into your RSS reader of choice:
http://mwkelley.dreamwidth.org/data/rss )

For the curious: I’m now fully moved into my new place on the other side of town– a house we’ve decided to name “the Satellite of Love” (an Mystery Science Theater reference, if you’re a total nerd)(or a Lou Reed reference, if you’re not). I turned in the keys to my old studio downtown on the 31st. Took my car key off the keyring this week too, since the house is right on a main busline, and it’s getting warm enough to bike around. Feels nice to be down to just two keys now. In my experience, “Number of keys” tends to correlate directly with “Level of stress”.

Things are in full swing at the greenhouse now– it’s been cold and miserable on the last couple of weekends, but plants are popping up everywhere. Business at the mill is still humming along– though it’s showing signs that the orders may soon be sloping off for the summer. Plus, the City is tearing up the pavement right in front of our front doors to bury power lines, so it’s going to be a scene of mass havoc for awhile.

I’m happy as ever. Enjoying sharing a roof with my new housemates just like I thought I would. Still working out a new daily routine. I’ll try to bash out some more details soon. Here’s the new mailing address, if yr interested:

Mike Kelley
c/o the Satellite of Love
1540 E Maryland St
Bellingham, WA 98226

It was quite lovely. On the same day that I stepped off the plane I was photographing manatees in Blue Springs with my new camera. I got to see a pre-dawn Space Shuttle launch (sadly, the last). I got to watch the Superbowl with my dad. My mom gave me a sewing lesson and I stitched a hole in my favorite sweater; it’s good as new. I paddled a kayak through a mangrove swamp with my sis, mom & aunts. I won four games of ping-pong, three games of Scrabble. Climbed an orange tree, and scrapped-up my hands leaping out of it. (plus, the oranges I picked were under-ripe and mercilessly bitter. oh well, it was fun anyway.) I saw hawks, herons, huge pelicans, ibises, ospreys… birds of all shapes and descriptions, everywhere. Watched some charming films: Up in the Air, Pixar’s Up, The Hangover (also, an old favorite: Jean Reno & the 13-y.o. Natalie Portman in The Professional). Just a fun week all around.

Last year my family went through some serious upheavals, so– most of all– it was good to get back together with my sister & parents and see that each of us is falling into our new routines pretty well.

Now I’m back in B’ham. Mostly ignoring the big Winter Olympics hubbub going on 50 miles to the north of me. I may wander over to the brewery later this week and do some spectating, but right now I have other things on my mind.

Since it’s been such a warm winter here in Whatcom County, folks at the greenhouse are talking about planting even earlier this year. I could be starting my “summer” weekend job this month(!), maybe even this weekend. That means going back to a no-days-off schedule again– kind of a bummer– but I’m excited by the prospect of two more paychecks each month. If my budget stays on track, I could have more than 50%(!) of my remaining debts paid off by October.

In the off-hours, I have my usual spread of pursuits and hobbies. Getting more serious about practicing on my guitar and piano again. My friends & I are still playing a lot of MtG, and I’ve also started playing Pauper Magic on MTG Online, which is a surprising amount of fun. I bought a new-used camera (a Canon G10) with the intention of improving my photography and getting back into Flickr. I’ll be restarting Nodeslam.com this week, finally. I’ve also been recording myself reading The Silmarillion outloud, purely for my own amusement. (I may upload the recordings at some point, but in a more out-of-the-way location. I don’t want to run afoul of the Tolkien estate. I’ll let you know.)

One of the things my dad sent me for my birthday last week was a double-CD of two Dave Mason LPs: It’s Like You Never Left from ‘74 and his self-titled follow-up album, Dave Mason. These were a couple of my father’s top-ten albums from that era, back when his life mirrored mine in a lot of ways. (Like me, my mom & dad left Michigan in their mid-twenties and moved to a laidback Cascadian college town– Corvallis OR, in their case– to go back to basics and enjoy a hippie lifestyle. Yes, this is basically where I got the idea.)

It got me thinking about what I’d choose as my top albums of this decade, the 2000s.

Furthermore, if you still haven’t heard: I broke up with my girlfriend Jet last Saturday and– although I’m still content with the decision and hope that Jet & I can still salvage a friendship– it’s thrown a ratchet into my brainpan that’s been rattling around all week. For any serious topic, it has made it hard to introspect farther back in time than the last few weeks and months, what I should have said and done differently, etc. So– in true [Rob Fleming] fashion– talking about music seems like a nice diversion.

And thirdly, I enjoy making lists. A lot. To an embarrassing extent.

10 years, 20 albums. Make it so.

2009

* Far, by Regina Spektor

I’d been predicting since mid-June that this would be my top album of 2009, and sure enough.

2008

* 3-WAY TIE: albums by local Bellingham bands that you’ve never heard of, but yet are better than most anything released on a major label that year =
All of My Friends Are Good People, by Go Slowpoke
Take This and Go, by Jenni Potts
New Ocean Waves, by Your Heart Breaks

These three, plus I Love You Avalanche– aka Anna Arvan, another B’hamster who plays in a half-dozen groups (including Go Slowpoke) yet shockingly has never released an album– really grabbed my attention in the summer of 2008 and made me realize that Bellingham has a local music scene worth listening to… and more generally, made me realize that most of the truly good music in the world is made in bars and basements, not music studios.

* 3-WAY TIE: some particularly awesome mix CDs =
Horace Phair 6 by fweez, icicle & ouroboros
Audiovisceral Club 1&2 by danndalf and indigoe
Indieboy Heartbreaker by chaotic_poet

I debated whether to include mix CDs on this list, but truth is I love love love mixes and I tend to reach for them a lot. So if you mailed or handed me a mix at some point this decade, it’s a safe bet that I’ve listened to it at least as many times as each of the other albums on here.

Special mention needed to go out to three, though, for containing a dangerously pressurized quantity of awesome-sauce and being my first intro to several excellent acts.

(technically Robbie gave me Indieboy Heartbreaker in 2007 but whatev, it fits here better.)

2007

* Faces in the Rocks, by Mariee Sioux
* Romance Conflict Adventure, by Best Friends Forever

2007 was the year I moved from my ski lodge in the Cascades back to Metamora for the summer, then I moved (to stay) in Bellingham that fall. Mariee Sioux is beautiful, mysterious, sublime Native-American-inflected folk music from the Pacific Northwest. Best Friends Forever is happy, happy, happy two-girls-and-some-drums pop music from Minnesota. I’d be hard-pressed to locate a better soundtrack for summer in the Midwest and winter in Cascadia.

The rest of these records are (slightly) less obscure, so I’ll slim down the commentary.

2006

* The Body, The Blood, The Machine by The Thermals
* Gulag Orkestar, by Beirut

2005

* The Woman King EP, by Iron & Wine

The only EP on the list, but I’d pick these 6 songs over anything else in the Sam Beam songbook.

* Illinois, by Sufjan Stevens
* Picaresque, by The Decemberists

2004

* Sanctuary, by Charlie Musselwhite

Given to me by an old co-worker of mine, “Barnacle” Bob Baker, an Alaskan deep-sea fisherman turned I.T. guy that I used to work with at the college. He knew I liked Jack White and Kurt Cobain, so one day he dropped some real blues on me. 2004 was the year I moved into my first apartment, and songs like “Homeless Child” and “Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield” packed (and still pack) a lot of wallop.

2003

* Her Majesty, The Decemberists

2002

* (), by Sigur Rós

2001

* White Blood Cells, by The White Stripes
* Space Lullabies and Other Fantasmagore, by Ekova

Ekova is Afro-Parisienne electronic/worldbeat something something something fusion… Probably the first truly strange album I’d ever sought out and purchased (at age 19) and it’s left a big impression. This album and another, similar disc (Bothy Culture by Irish musician Martyn Bennett, which I’d discovered via dad) opened up a massive new sonic landscape for me.

2000

* De Stijl, The White Stripes

This album came out literally a week after I graduated high school, although I wasn’t cool enough to know it at the time. (Like most everyone else, I’d only found out about the Stripes after White Blood Cells hit Top 40 and Jack & Meg became kind of a big deal.) Of all the albums on this list, De Stijl is the one that I can see myself still raving about 30 years hence. It deserves a spot in the rock-gods’ canon, somewhere between Led Zeppelin IV and Electric Ladyland.

Hell, De Stijl would also make my desert island top-five, next to The White Album and Tigermilk, but that list would be another long excursion all together.

We’ve been busy at the mill. A lot of people dust off their cookbooks around this time of year, and that means a lot of extra demand for good flour. I’m happy to provide.

I’ve had two jobs in my life that I’ve really enjoyed. The first was my I.T. internship at Oakland CC in Auburn Hills, but that was mostly due to the laidback work environment; I loved the comraderie of hanging out in nerd central with the other I.T. guys, playing Unreal Tournament on the college LAN and waiting around for trouble tickets to roll into the queue so that we could swoop in and save the day. When it came to the actual job though– fixing finicky PCs & printers– meh, it was fun but it got boring after awhile. I didn’t feel like I was really doing anything, just maintaining other people’s tools so that they could carry on with their day.

I never get bored of making flour, though. Mostly because my job is so easy. I feel as if Kevin– the miller, or in other words, the mill’s owner, my boss (I find it an interesting statement about 21st century life that all of my friends know what an I.T. guy’s job is, but I have to explain every facet of what a miller does for a living)– I feel as if Kevin has the hard job, talking with customers & suppliers, making business decisions on what grain to buy & what prices to charge for our flour. Making the flour (my job) is the easy part. It’s so simple that there’s nothing to get bored *of*. Hell, making flour is something that hunter-gatherer societies had figured out. Using electricity to do it makes the machines more complicated, but it tends to save on labor. And since we only use organic grain purchased from trusted sources in WA, the nearby states, & Canada, I have complete confidence that the flour I make every day is at least as good or better than the flour made by every other miller’s assistant in the entire history of humanity.

So, in other words, I like my job. It doesn’t pay a lot but it pays the bills, and it helps pay my debts, and gives me a little left over on the side to have some fun and a lot of extra free-time to enjoy it. Sometimes, in moodier moments, I come down a little hard on myself for living as a modern-day peasant in a world where wealthier people have access to such incredible things– books with electronic ink, cars that run on cooking oil or get 200mpg, hiking gear made out of space-age materials, routine travel on intercontinental airliners, …. But then, I look around even within my own circle of friends and also see a lot of people who are currently looking for work & having a stressful time of it– most of them better educated & more hard-working than I am– and I feel supremely fortunate that I’ve lucked my way into such a lovely lot in life.

Though that doesn’t mean that I expect to be a miller for the next 40 years. I’d be content to do that, sure, but I have other things in mind.

More on that next time.