After I read Pillars of the Earth last summer I decided to put off reading the next book, World Without End, because Pillars destroyed my week. In a good way, mind you, but still. I couldn’t afford that kind of thing two weeks in a row. Or even two weeks in as many months. Also I wanted something to look forward to.

Now that the wedding’s over and we don’t have any TV shows to compulsively watch, I decided last weekend that I was ready to have my life eaten by a good book again. World Without End has definitely been delivering. I’m still not done with it, and I’ve had to read the book summary and skip around to the sections I was really looking forward to in order to keep myself from going insane.

Life is a Lot Better When You Want to Improve at Your Job

You’ll make more money. You’ll be more effective. You’ll more easily be able to switch jobs. People will be more able to handle it when you make mistakes. Etc.

Conversely, if you don’t want to improve at your job you won’t maximize your earning potential, you won’t be very effective, you’ll have a hard time finding another job in your field, and you won’t be very happy. It’s not fun feeling like you could be making more of your life if you were doing something else.

8 Hours Is Not Enough

I like the feeling of not being busy. I like playing with the cat, chit-chatting with Aaron, watching favorite TV shows, and spending time with friends and family. (Although sometimes the last one can feel like a chore…) I like choosing what to do based on what I feel like doing rather than based on what’s on my list.

I also like making progress on projects. I like being able to say I’m one step closer to my goals. I like making things. I like working through my mental blocks. I like practicing musics. I like learning about new things.

The 8 hours when I’m not at work and I’m not sleeping often don’t feel like enough time to relax, produce things, and do dishes. I also tend to get resentful about not having enough time to pursue worthwhile projects or having to choose between a Project and playing with the kitty (or the husband). Saying no is hard when I really do want to say yes.

I think the solution is to accept where I am… that I don’t have all the time in the world. I also need to remind myself that this state is temporary, and eventually my time will be much better aligned with my aspirations.

Online Shareable Lists are Cool

One of the reasons I wanted an iPhone was to have shared lists with Aaron. When I finally got one last fall I didn’t end up putting any list sharing software on it because there didn’t seem to be any good ones.

This week I had another look and found Listingly, which does just about everything I want. Aaron and I now have simple, shareable lists available anywhere that has internet access. Easy to update using my phone too. If there’s anyone you’d like to share to-do lists with, you should take a look at this site.

Building a Backlog of Content

I’m working on writing a backlog of well written content for TPLT. Once I get enough posts in there I’ll start posting them on Wednesdays in addition to the weekly check-in.

That’s it for now. Have a good weekend!

The Wedding Party (Click for full size)

Aaron and I are the ones in the center in case you couldn’t guess. I made my dress and the dresses for the two ladies on the left. And by made I mean I could have done just about all of it myself, but due to time constraints I sought out a lot of help from my friends.

Not sure I’d make the same decisions if I were doing it all over again. On the one hand I’m happy that the dresses were pretty historically accurate and they turned out well. On the other hand it was a hell of a lot of work for people who don’t do reenactment. Chances are I would have made mine myself and then either ordered the rest from a Renaissance festival clothing website or made them a lot simpler. Such is life. I hadn’t intended to do more than mine in the first place and then things happened and I ended up making them. :-/

So, things I learned.

Our Community is Pretty Awesome

I have a great group of friends that really came through for us for our event. I think the only people involved with the wedding that we didn’t know intimately were the caterer (who just supplied the food; no staff) and the site person. Everything else was done by someone I’m either on a first name basis with or is family.

I’d talked a while back about how modern secular weddings are missing something, and I realized something about my wedding. It may not have had the religious aspect, but we definitely tapped into an old tradition… the tradition of everyone in the village working together to make the wedding day(s) happen. That was really special. And happy.

Sometime in the coming weeks we’re going to have a Thank You party for everyone who helped out with the wedding. There’s a pretty good chance Aaron and I will get weepy at that.

Detachment? Have I talked about that here?

Detachment is a pretty good policy in general, but it’s especially important in anything where your friends are helping you out with stuff. It’s one thing to yell at a stranger because something they did didn’t meet your expectations… you’re not going to hang out with them after the contract is up. With friends, you really shouldn’t yell at them for not helping you the way you want them to. For one thing it’s mean to yell at anyone. For another, they’re helping you! Yelling at someone for volunteering their time does not win you anything except grief. Plus, chances are whatever your vision was wasn’t that important anyway.

Also it’s hard to have a complete vision of everything. Better to give people the space to be creative. The more detached you are from your vision, the more surprised and happy you’ll be by what you end up with. For instance, I had no idea what I wanted from the flowers. Giving my friend the freedom to do what she wanted meant I got pleasantly surprised and I didn’t have to spend time explaining what I wanted.

So yeah, yay detatchment!

I like running events

Not that I was actually running this one. We had people on site in charge of making sure things got done, but I think I’d like being in charge of such things too. We’re thinking of having an anniversary dinner dance next year with more dancing a fewer funny costumes. Methinks that’d be a lot of fun, and a lot less work to plan.

It’s nice to be officially married

Aaron and I signed the papers in September, but we didn’t publicly change our status until after the June wedding. We’d been in limbo for 3/4 of a year and by the end it was really annoying. We didn’t know how to introduce ourselves to new people. We didn’t know whether or not we should let people know we signed the papers. Etc. It was weird. I have more thoughts on this that deserve their own post. Suffice it to say, I’m happy to be able to call Aaron my husband now.

I like kayaking

We went kayaking on our honeymoon. I could see myself doing more of that. There’s a club in Ann Arbor I might join. I’m wary because I already have a busy schedule, but I’ve been feeling like my “likes being in nature” side doesn’t get enough attention.

Will probably keep doing one of those things I’d thought about quitting

In the last check-in I’d said I was planning to give up some positions I have. I’ve decided to hold off on doing that for one of them. I’m excited about where that one is going and the person I had in mind for the job I think won’t be that interested in the new direction.

Still a few more wedding thoughts

I have about three posts in my heading related to our wedding and marriage in general. Hopefully after that I’ll be done with this topic.

That’s about it for me right now.

I’ll be back to regular posting schedule next week.

(Btw… The wedding was awesome! Hee!)

Self-Consciousness

When it comes to this blog I’m incredibly self-conscious. I feel like a fraud. I have a hard time telling people what I write about and feel like I need to defend why I want to write what I write. I need to get over this. The best way to do that is write about stuff I know. So that is what I will do… after the wedding.

Plans

After the wedding this blog will be my top priority. (After usual things like keeping up my current job, keeping my relationships afloat, not letting the house deteriorate too much… etc.) Basically Wedding Crapé will be replaced by Blogging Crapé.

Second to this will be music stuff. Specifically recording an album of Italian Renaissance dance music with Aaron and various other musicians from around these parts.

Third is artsy stuff like sewing myself a new Medieval dress or two for Pennsic. (I’m tired of all the unflattering cotton stuff I have, and my new Tudor Wedding Garb is too nice for camping.) Also I’d like to experiment with making period jewelry and kids clothes to sell. And maybe putting pockets in my skirts.

I will keep this order of precedence in mind.

Letting Go

Methinks I need to let go of some commitments that are weighing me down right now and will weigh me down even more if I try to pursue my already mentioned plans. At the moment, I’m holding on… doing the minimum… but I’m not growing as a leader and the people I’m supposed to be leading are suffering for it. Also I see people who would do a much better job in my place. I shouldn’t stop them from shining.

But it’s hard. I feel guilty for not wanting to grow into these positions. I had dreams for myself and they no longer fit. At the same time I know that feeling guilty about not fulfilling past dreams is silly. It doesn’t make me do what I need to do to be the right person for the job. It just makes me feel bad.

Also, it’s not like I can’t go back to these positions later. I could definitely see myself doing that at some point.

Spending to Earn

I’m thinking about spending money on this Blogging project of mine. I want a better design for the site and I have someone in mind to do it. But that will cost $$. I’ve also been looking for a community to help me get over my business/blogging related mental-blocks. I think I’ve found one that would be a good fit for me, but it costs $$. My hyper-sensitive instinct says paying money for such “help” is a scam or something, but if I view it through the lens of “it’s a class” it’s not so bad.

The trick is I need to block out the time to actually make use of it. It’s not going to be something where I just show up and have everything done for me. I’m going to have to pay money and work. But I think in the end it’ll be worth the effort. I’ll about it for another few weeks before I make any serious commitments. Plus there’s a wait list so I may not even get in.

At this point I trust myself to keep going with this blogging thing. I’ve been doing it for over a year and a half. I’d still really like doing it and want to improve at it. It’s worth throwing money at. Also throwing money at anything not related to music is a big mental block of mine so… yeah.

That’s about it for now. A week from Sunday is The Wedding. You can expect a Weekly Check-in next Friday. After that I’ll be on my honeymoon in Colorado. I’ll try to have some post ready for that Friday. It won’t be a check-in because… I won’t be there for the checking in. But it’ll be something.

Whee!

Just changed the domain name of LVC to ThePathLessTraveled.net Reason: No one could pronounce LVC

There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s the big one. For branding purposes, picking a French title was a bad idea. If people aren’t sure how to pronounce the domain name they won’t talk about it to anyone else. A ginormous drawback.

I decided to make the change now instead of when everything was totally ready (like a new front page, about page, theme, among other things) because I was tired of waiting to start building my blog. The domain name was holding me back. I had to get rid of that barrier. I had to change it now.

Why ThePathLessTraveled.net?

Because TheConsciousLife.net was taken.

Seriously though, I like “The Path Less Traveled” better as a name than “The Conscious Life”. TPLT is aspirational, visual, and has the right connotation. It’s about living a better life by taking the hard, good road. It’s about challenging yourself. It conjures a vision of a path in a forest full of obstacles that leads to something beautiful. “The Conscious Life”, on the other hand, is a bit vague. What does it mean to be live a conscious life? Would you know what a blog with that title was about? What image comes to mind? To the first two questions I have a vague notion of what it means to live consciously and what kind of content a blog with that title would have. As for images, nothing specifically comes to mind.

Oh, yeah, and there’s that Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken”… The blog is practically automatically memorable.

The bottom line is this new title excites me. It makes me want to talk about my blog. It makes me want to promote my blog. I have confidence other people will be more inclined to talk about my blog with its new title.

New Feed Location

If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed, it’s in a new location. The old one will still work, but one day many moons from now I may retire it. Proceed at your own risk.

New Twitter Username Too

I changed my twitter username to niquepath. I went away from the “use my blog’s name” approach since thepathlesstraveled is so long–a definite negative on twitter. I’m also unlikely to want to use my name for anything else. If I feel the need to use twitter for Early Music stuff I can use blowthyhorn, which I already have registered.

If you’re already following me on twitter, you don’t have to change anything. It should have updated it automatically.

Yay changes!

• I wrote a series on my experience practicing abstinence.
• I wrote a post on how to know if you’re in the wrong major or career. This turned out to be way more popular than I expected it to be.
• I wrote a post on how to keep your integrity when you make a new goal; very applicable for those of us making New Year’s Resolutions.
• In total I wrote 47 posts in 2009. Not too bad. It averages out to a little under one post per week.
• I graduated from University of Michigan in May. (Yay! It’s over!)
• I got a job at the University.
• I bought a house.

My goal for 2009 was to concentrate on writing. I had visions of me pouring over my old blog posts, crafting them into masterworks. Yeah, that didn’t happen. I did, however, write quite a bit, so I didn’t totally fail.

For 2010, I’m again going to focus on writing. I may go through some old posts and polish them up a bit. Mostly I’m planning to write regularly. None of these month long breaks like I had during the summer. I’d also like to build up a reserve of posts I can take the time to really think through a post or two. I want to provide something really valuable here. What that means is for January I’m going to move to a one post per week cycle, posted every Friday. In February I’ll probably ramp it up a bit.

To combat this I’ve picked a theme for 2010: Relationships. It’s already the topic with the most posts (19 as of today), it’s an area where I have a lot to say, and it’s an area I need to work on. In case you’re wondering, the reason I think I need to work on it is that I’m an introvert and don’t really want to be. I have no problem being around people I know well 24/7, but being around lots of new people drains my energy. I do not want to have this drain of energy anymore. I have a hunch that the problem lies in some kind of mental block–it’s not like I’m anti-people or something–so I imagine some practice and some navel gazing ought to do the trick… or at least do something. Making it my focus for 2010 will be incentive to do something about it. I’ll report what I learn on here.

You’ll notice that by “Relationships” I’m not just referring to primary romantic relationships. In fact, that’s not really something I intend to cover all that much. There are plenty of books on that topic, and many of us are starving for other intimate relationships. We have friends, but can we count on them when we’re in need? How can we develop strong friendships? That kind of thing.

Also just because I’m focusing on relationships doesn’t mean that will be the only thing I write about. It’ll just be the default topic.

Looking forward to an exciting year!