To Do

I always have a long "to do" list, and credit Jay Hyde and Mike Ferrari, then Waldenbooks buyers, who impressed me years ago with their Franklin Planners and effective use thereof (see, I talk like a lawyer now). I got one myself and found it very helpful, although my mother said it was like a Barbie doll in the way it demanded accessories such as cute little hole punch, cute little pouch for stamps or pens, cute color paper for lists, etc.

Once I was at IDG, surrounded by people with PalmPilots, I was mesmerized by them, and still love my Palm (I think I am on my third since 1999 when Katie McGowan and I bought them online simultaneously while we talked on the phone) despite the fact that there are much fancier gadgets around. In its prime, my Palm's best feature was that I could access a spreadsheet listing all the books I own so that I wouldn't purchase duplicates. Now the annoying thing crashes whenever I try to open a spreadsheet. Palm - or at least its agent, Circuit City - blamed this on Documents-to-Go (software) so refused to honor the warranty (hardware). By then I had a BlackBerry, so I decided it was silly to waste my energy fighting (and Circuit City has gone bankrupt when clearly I would have been spending millions in their store if not miffed).

Still, the "to do" list on the Palm is MUCH better than on the BlackBerry. The only challenge is when one scribbles an item quickly and later on cannot figure out what it was meant to be! For example, on May 17th, I have a note for myself: "Check Maria Holt."

The logical meaning would be that Holt is publishing a book in May called Maria which I should either order or read or both. Yet a quick search on Amazon yielded no such book. There is a Macmillan author named Maria Holt who writes on the Middle East but that is not my thing. There are a few random people on Facebook by that name but no one I know. I suppose the meaning may come back to me in the middle of the night but in the meantime I will move it to the bottom of the list, along with:

* San Diego, Fall 2011 (so I won't forget to go!)
* Quilt Museum, Lowell (before 2011, I hope)
* Frame diplomas (for a long time I had misplaced my college diploma, now I can't find my law school diploma)
and so on . . .