Today is so much different than just a few days ago. But today is also special – It’s Leap Day – but since I don’t know what will happen today I’ll write about today, tomorrow.
While I was outside working on the yard and planning my garden for 2024 on Tuesday, Yesterday turned bitter cold, and we got 1-2 inches of powdery snow.
I often mis-remember the weather we have – sometimes exaggerating how bad a certain storm was, or how much rainfall we got. Now, with this website, I won’t have that issue.
For years, I’ve been using WordPress for my blogs and on-line projects. At this time I’d say I was an expert in the platform. I’m not at the developer level, but I am more than a power user
Over the years, lots of things have been added to it, mostly in the area of being able to customize and design your own website. Visual and theme editors have added lots of bloat, but my favorite key feature remains – Categories and Tags.
I’ve always loved organizing things – from my LEGO collection in the basement, to the containers I make with my 3-D printer, to how I used to organize my room as a kid.
Looking back, and with much therapy, I realize that my beginnings in organization are rooted in procrastination, which is a mask for a deeper fear of failure and even deeper fear of being criticized and letting people down.
I would spend time making the world around me prettier (for me) and easy to understand as everything else was ugly and chaotic to my growing and developing brain. This would allow me to put off doing the necessary task, and avoid all my emotional fears around it.
Over the years I have labeled this “working in vs working on”. Am I working on the task that truly needs to be done, or am I working on something around the task that is related, but not exactly what needs to be done.
For instance – spending time organizing a desk, or cleaning up my downloads folder before I could do any sort of work. Putting pencils away, sorting papers, and wiping down surfaces. Not to the OCD level of everything has to be lined up in a special way, but instead in a way that puts off doing the necessary task.
Or, another exampe is our current laundry room. It is functional but ugly – it needs to be remodeled. I’m not working on it because I feel like I need a certain tool that I don’t have before I can even get started.
Its a hard mental block for me to get through.
I end up working in the task, rather than workng on it.
Which brings me back to WordPress in a strange way that only my logic understands.
As I mentioned above, WordPress uses Taxonomies to sort and organize your projects and writing. Categories and Tags are powerful tools that I’ll write about exactly how I use them in a future post.
For today, coming full circle, I will use Tags to keep track of the weather. Categories are more broad. I’m not sure what categories this blog will eventually have, and I’ll let my writing and furture topics dictate them after I have a few dozen posts.
Tags are much more flexible than Categories. Here are the ones I’ve set up for the weather going forward, and it is based on what I expect the weather to be for the next year
Sample Weather Tags:
- Snow on the Ground
- Storm
- <1 inch of Snow
- 1-2 inches of snow
- 2-4 inches of snow
- 4-6 inches of snow
- 6-12 inches of snow
- 1-2 feet of snow
- 2-4 feet of snow
- 4+ feet of snow – I haven’t experienced this yet but when I do I’ll add it
- Sunny
- Partly Sunny
- Windy
- Cold with Wind Chill
- Sweatshirt weather
- Pool Day
And as I experience other days, I’ll add to the category as necessary.
Anyway – I should say that setting up tags is working IN the job- not exactly on it. Working ON it was the actual task of writing this post.