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It occurs to me that I might just have a bit of a bad attitude. Not that it’s not warranted, mind you, but it’s bad nonetheless. The only thing I’m not sure of is what to do about it.

BaseCamp is a slick project management/client extranet tool build by the team at 37signals. They’re providing an object lesson in how to identify an internal need and turn it into a business venture with the responsiveness and attention to detail that they’ve been known for in their other work.

Just when we were starting to think we would never see nice weather again, we get today. I cannot remember a more gorgeous day or more perfect weather - mid-70’s and sunny, clear blue skies. Fabulous.

There’s something fun about waking up on a Saturday morning to find masses of little kids gathering behind your house to start a parade. (Why? We don’t know. Scouts, maybe, or Little League. They have parades for everything around here.) Nothing “big parade” - a few cars with balloons attached, lots of little kids, and parents lining the sides of a block or two that had been blocked off by the local sherriff’s department.

Since the lawn guy was here and we didn’t want the dogs to completely freak out, we grabbed their leashes and took off for a walk. What we intended as a fairly normal walk turned into almost two hours of hiking around the big park behind the high school. It was still pretty muddy and mucky in the shaded areas, but gorgeous otherwise. I often forget how lucky we are that there’s nothing at all between our house and over 350 acres of sports fields and protected woodlands than the high school. You can hike in far enough that - other than occasional airplanes - you can’t hear civilization at all…but you’re still only a few minutes’ walk from home.

Definitely a great start to the weekend.

I like baseball. I didn’t used to, but now I do. Wanna know why? Well, these reasons aren’t far off the mark.

We’ve often joked that what this household needs most is a housewife. Lately, the jokes have taken on that slightly frantic and panic-laced tone that says we’re not so much with the joking, but are steadily being buried alive by the mass of things left undone, the ever-expanding to-do list, and—most of all—the unending onslaught of incoming paper that is undented by our outgoing efforts.

It’s not the junk mail that’s killing us, though it’s irritating that no matter how many “do not send us your crap” forms we complete or how many preference lists we’re allegedly on, the mail does not stop. And it’s not just our mail, either - it’s everyone with every permutation of our last name and my maiden name and his parents and his sister (none of whom have lived with him for well over ten years now, and never at this address) and everyone else with anything resembling our last names who have ever resided within a hundred or so miles. (So I exaggerate maybe a tiny bit, but still - we consistently get preapproved credit card offers and other assorted junk clearly meant for J’s parents, even though they have never lived here or done any business using our address that any of us is aware of. I digress…)

No, the junk mail is by and large easy to dispose of, sent unopened on a trip through our trusty office-capacity shredder. (You do have a shredder, don’t you? If not, stop reading now and go get one—we’ll wait.)

No, it’s the real mail that’s killing us. I’m far too distrustful (having been burned one too many times) to set up automatic payments for the vast majority of our bills, so each of our regular bills arrives monthly (or thereabouts) and must be opened and scanned for errors and that month’s payment amount duly noted and the payment made - the satellite tv service, the gas bill, water bill, trash bill, electric bill, telephone bill, DSL, mobile phone, mortgage, car payment… Then there are the credit cards, miscellaneous magazine subscriptions and other periodic or non-essential bills that get tossed into the mix.

Then there’s the junk mail that masquerades as important notices from those people - the life insurance pitches that come from the mortgage company with “Important notice” stamped on the envelope. The mortgage refinancing offers from the auto finance company and the auto financing offers from the mortgage company. The three million offers each from the credit cards. The student loan notices that say nothing. The ten renewal notices for each subscription that get sent before the subscription actually expires. The pitches for membership renewal in every charitable organisation we’ve ever given to…and every organization related to them in any way (most of those get pitched unopened, yes, but some with a slight twinge of guilt).

Weren’t we supposed to be a paperless society by now? If so, why am I constantly buried in this mountain of paper?

This has been making the rounds lately, and it makes me laugh: the Six Patron Saints of Graphic Design. Because everyone needs a patron saint (or two).

Change is a difficult thing for me. Not so much the changing itself, really…it’s deciding to make the change that’s difficult. I’m notorious for thinking and considering, researching and dithering forever before I make a decision - usually very quietly and privately - and then, once my decision is made, whipping through the change itself in record time. I might take months - years, even - to make a decision about something, but once my mind’s made up, I dont’ waste time on my execution.

Ten years ago now, I spend months thinking about what to do with my life - whether to stay in my hometown or move away, stay in school or leave and start working. I went back and forth and back again before I decided what to do.

Sometimes I forget that just because I’ve been thinking about something for a long time doesn’t mean that anyone else is privy to what’s been going on in my head. Everyone around me was shocked when I “suddenly” decided to leave school and move to DC. Even though it had been in the works for ages, from my perspective (since the thinking and deciding is 95% of the work for me), from the time I announced that I was going to move to the time I was settled into an apartment and a new job was less than two weeks and left more than one person reeling a bit in surprise.

No, I’m not making any big announcement here. I’m just…thinking.