Background:

I do all the administrative-like tasks in our two-person household. I pay the bills, handle the mail ( see the post on paperless mail ), handle income and property taxes, our immigration paperwork, etc., etc., etc.

All this work is mostly digital, mostly stored on my computer. I have it all backed up on an external hard-drive, so that if my computer crashes, I can recover everything. But it dawned on me the other day: What of something happens to ME?

I have to confess- I'm not the most organized person, despite having a degree in Library-stuff. I use technology to make up for the fact that I dump things in files without a very good system- I make use of applications that have good built-in search features to find things, and still I occasionally find myself thinking, Did I tag this with 'visa' or 'immigration'?

So if I somehow got konked over the head and ended up in a hostpital with amnesia, Rob would have to go through my computer and sort everything out. A couple of different problems would arise:

1: Where and how important documents are stored. Physical docs are not a problem. He knows where the birth certificates and passports are. But what about that pesky letter from the IRS that needs to be taken care of?

2: Scattered Accounts: We have different accounts at different institutions, that I interface with on the web, which have different URLs and passwords. 

3: Security: Rob does not have access my personal accounts: My personal email, the payment accounts I use for clients, the websites I own and maintain. Does he even know about all of them? If something happened to me, he would get a power of attorney-- but really, what a pain!

The fact is, by taking on the responsibility for maintaining all our household administrative tasks, I have also created a somewhat dangerous situation should anything happen to me. With digitization comes increased security, but it's all designed for the personal user, not the family. Have you ever seen a bank account that allows online access by multiple logins?

Proposed Solution:

I obviously need to put togather an "emergency manual" that has all the important information that Rob would need if I get kidnapped or marooned on a deserted island.  I could share it as a Google Doc or some such, but I'm uncomfortable with this kind of information being stored in the "cloud," as they say. I think the best place to keep it is on my external hard drive.

Included in this emergency manual should be:

• A list of all our bank accounts, URLs to the web interface, and passwords (including paypal, etc.)
• A list of all the bills we pay, passwords, etc.
• List of and passwords for my email accounts
• The name, address, and email of people that might need to be notified in emergency: lawyer, accountant, family members, and clients/employers
• The name of the file where all bank statements, tax returns, etc. are kept. (Since this would be a file that is constantly added to, it would need a pointer rather than the docs themselves)
• The names and contact info. for all household services, employees (gardener, fumigator, housekeeper, etc.), how often they are used and what they are paid.

This is the best solution I have come up with so far. And of course, I need to tell Rob it exists. Anyone else have interesting solutions to this problem? I would love to hear about them.

The lexile search can be found here. The wizard works pretty well, allowing you to either estimate the reading level by whether your child finds grade-level books easy or difficult, or search by the actual lexile ranking if you know it. It then gives you a sample text to read, allows you to narrow by the child's interest, and then gives you suggestions.

Events:

Tweance: That's right. The first seance on Twitter is going to be happening Friday morning the 30th (the site doesn't say what time yet- but it's London time, I believe). Renowned psychic, Jayne Wallace is going to be asking questions to River Phoenix, Curt Cobain, William Shakespeare, and Michael Jackson. It's sponsored by a costume shop in London. You can follow at http://twitter.com/tweance.

Unicef : Unicef traditionally has trick-or-treat charities during Halloween, and this year, they make it easier than ever to make a donation. If you text "TOT" to Unicef- 864233, you will donate $5 to UNICEF.

Costume ideas:

iPhone: iPhone has a Halloween costume generator to help you out with ideas. You can put in general words like "witch" or "wizard" or filter by age, gender, occasion etc. It's $1.99

For the lazy: The Huffington post has some old-school masks that you can print out (the kind with dotted lines around the face and the eyes- tie to your head with string). Go as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Kanye West, or Rod Blagojveck

For the Online Addict: Go as your Facebook profile. Get a picture of your profile blown up on posterbard and cut out the square for your face.

For the REAL Online addict: Go as a LOLcat. Don't know what a LOLcat is? Go here. Dress as a cat with a T-shirt that says LOL on the front, or hang a funny caption around your neck, such as "I can haz Halloween candy?" LOL speak has sort of evolved into its own language, so go to the site to see examples before you choose a "capshun."

Super-Tech:

If you are a Verizon customer, Verizon has a new service called Family Locator that uses the GPS locator in your child's cell phone to let you know where they are. It's 9.99 a month, you have to be enrolled in Verizon's Friends and Family plan, and you have to have compatible phones. If this is successful, I can see other companies following along.

While working at home can be very freeing, it also has its own set of challenges. One of the biggest for me is staying focused. Because I am the kind of person who hates to say no to anybody, I often find myself interrupted in my work to do things for others. If I am on a task that I consider particularly boring or hard to understand, I also find myself procrastinating.

I am not a natually high-energy Type-A personality, so I need to train myself to stay focused. One way I do this is by using a timer. I set a digital egg timer (I use a timer from Apimac for my Mac, but there are several free timers available for Windows as well) for a period of time that will be easy to concentrate: if it is a particularly tough day, this might be only ten or fifteen minutes. For this time, I work, with no distractions, no matter what. When the timer sounds, I reward myself with a very short break.

I use the timer process over and over, and write on a scratch pad how many times I have done it, so I know how much work I have put in. Then I gradually increase the time on the timer, so that I am working for 50 minutes and relaxing for ten, or working for two hours, relaxing for fifteen.

For those type-A personalities, the problem can go the other way: working too hard, without taking breaks. The timer can help with this, too. Remember, an office worker in a regular cubicle farm does not accomplish eight hours of work in an eight-hour day. There are coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, chats with colleagues, phone calls, planning, organization, etc. Working from home eliminates a lot of this, but you should not expect yourself to work straight for several hours without relaxing, or you will burn out. 

Keeping track of my work with a timer helps me keep the balance between work and rest, when I have no one looking over my shoulder.

I just got back from a two-week bicycle tour. We took with us both Flip video cameras (which are awesome) and a regular digital camera. We used both, and I've been thinking about what each one was good for.

Video: You need video when what you want to capture has more than a visual dimension, where there is movement, or sound. This sounds obvious, but sometimes we took video where pictures would have sufficed. For instance, a tour through the Camden public library was not served by video. Everyone is silent and sitting still. The feel of the place could have been captured better by pictures; the video turned out boring. On the other hand, when we were in our tent during the tail end of a hurricane, only video could capture the sound of the rain beating down on us and our reaction to it. Video is also great for capturing little mini "interviews" about something that just happened, or people who are fascinating characters.

Pictures: I'm not a very good photographer, but to me a picture needs to have a lot of information that can be summed up in an instant: a view, a funny sign, an iconic image. Scenery is much better through photos than video. Also, photos with objects that tell a story in themselves.

Of course, you can take still pictures from video if you don't want to bring two devices. Or you can get a camera that also does video. We chose the Flip video cameras because they are small and the video quality is excellent. I also took the camera because I think taking still shots from video is a pain in the butt.

I'm not a very good documentarian, but I think I am learning a lot about which medium serves to capture different situations.