Ha! Made you look! So sue me if I have a little fun with the post titles. I am, however, fixing to go on a rave about two new things I just discovered. I have no monetary interest in either of these items. They just ROCK!

First, I think I may finally be able to be a non-crappy Twitter person! Don’t laugh – this is dream of mine. I see all these folks just twittering away – always current, “here’s what I’m doing,” little chit chats in their own twitter little way. Ugh! I could update twitter once, maybe twice, an eon!

Underachiever no longer. Thanks to Chris Cree, I have discovered Snitter. This little window of magic allows my Tweets to sit in an IM type box in the corner of my desktop. It makes little noises when someone tweets me and I can change the color. Woo Hoo! I too will be a Twitter master. Hey, you have your dreams, I have mine.

So now, I need more coffee to keep me awake because my new Snitter toy is keeping me up late at night. Unfortunately, I like yummy flavored coffee and my husband likes, well, just coffee. And since we have the thermal coffee maker, he will take the whole coffee pot when he leaves for work – and that’s okay because I love him. But it does mean no more coffee for April.

Until eWomen Network’s Holiday Extravaganza where I won the coolest thing at the Silent Auction! My beautiful, new, personal coffee maker. No mess, no hassle, 3 minutes to fresh brewed. My kids made hot chocolate this morning, and I made coffee. I can’t even explain to you how cool this machine is. They have heavy duty ones for the office. But, this one is mine. Zoe, you are the best. Thanks for the machine.

You know you want my Snitter coffee

Time for a good Saturday rant so I can vent it all out and get on with my beautiful day.

I am so incredibly tired of spammers. What a waste of space. They used to just mildly irritate me. Nature of the beast and all that. I didn’t give it much thought.

Recently, it does more than irritate – it makes me mad. For a few days I have been contemplating whether of not I am overreacting or if my furor was warranted.

I have decided it is justified.

First – what a freaking time waster. Do I have spam filters? Sure I do. But I have to go through them to make sure something legitimate did not get hung up with the garbage. Great comments from friends of the blog, fairly important emails, and actual need to know notifications have been fished out of these filters. I hate to think about the ones I missed.

Second – I get hung up in spam filters. I have gotten a few (not too many, thank goodness) that says something like,”Sorry it’s taken so long. I found you in my filter.” Ugh!

Third (and most important) – The spam is incredibly sexually explicit. They do not live in the world of innuendo or suggestion. They are blatant and they do not wait for the message – it’s right there in the subject. That may be fine for some folks to just hit delete. Heck, I don’t even mind it – I don’t like it but I also know where the delete button is. But, I have children in my home and while we police their computer usage very carefully, keeping this out of their sight is a daunting task.

Putting the trash out there for all the kids to see. Filling the world with garbage. Nice. Good job, Spammers.

Leave it to Craig Harper to come up with an “in your face” challenge that my nature just cannot turn away from.  Get Yer S**t Together  kicks off tomorrow. 

I will admit to thinking, “Who really needs to participate in another bloggy challenge?” Then I opened my feed reader yesterday (blasted thing).  There’s David Zinger over at Slacker Manager talking about positive changes for a great New Year.  Then Rosa (my mentor extraordinaire) urging that we set goals for Septemeber.  Ok – I get the point

So, GYST is a 4 week challenge to pick something and change it!  Monday is post progress day. Today is planning day.

Yes – I have picked a goal.

Chaos is awesome in my life.  It’s fun, exciting, and different.  Chaos is awful in my house.  It is depressing, task inhibiting, and continually sabotages my goals.

I am cleaning the chaos.  Clutter beware!  Goodwill rejoice!

Each day will have a room devoted to it…some rooms will require more than one day because obviously I cannot devote a whole day to the task.  I am going to start with the storage areas so that the stuff that has collected in the living spaces will have some place to go.  I am also buying tons of trash bag!

While I was pregnant with our second daughter, my body did a strange thing…it’s mass increased by 80 pounds.  Hmm.  Pregnant causes some of that.  Eddy’s Double Chocolate Chunk and McDonald’s french fires causes the rest.  Who knew?

Anyway, I got real serious about taking off that baby weight.  In the process, I learned that not only do I like weight training, but it works really well for my body makeup.  Coupled with the fact that I have always been fairly strong, this regimen seemed like a good fit.

So that’s what’s bee going on over at the Energy Oasis.  Some treadmill, some ab work, lots of weights.  But, I am fairly close to my goal and really have the luxury of just maintaining.  Hmmm.  Maybe I don’t have to lift all the time.  I joined a great gym and they have Yoga.  Yoga.  Nice, relaxing, stretch, inhale the good, exhale the bad, find your center Yoga.

HA!  Yoga is hard!  Who knew?  You did probably, but I didn’t.  Downward Dog for 10 breaths and my arms felt like jello. (There has to be an I can has cheezburger caption in that last sentence somewhere).

The class was so hard that I stayed after to make sure I was doing it right.  I was and it was.  But Rorie was awesome.  She was excited it was my first class, encouraged me to keep coming back, and said it would get easier.

It better.   Don’t know how long I can live with the “kicked by a horse” feeling.

For those who don’t know, I have recently recovered from 2 solid years of pregnancy – yep, I’ve got the elephants beat.

In February 2005, we discovered that we were expecting our third child.  A crushing blow came 2 months later when we found out we had lost her.  2 months later, we got the news that we were already expecting again – we were amazed and welcomed Emily into the world February 2006.  In June, we were greatly surprised to find out that our family was about to fly in the face of conventional medical opinion.  Despite multiple preventative measures, we were expecting again.  In February 2007, Morgan graced us with her presence.

2 years.  Pregnant. Wow.

Now, Morgan is 6 months old.  It’s time to face the facts.  I need a gym membership.

As luck would have it, the opportunity to obtain one occurred under fantastic circumstances.

Kathy Ackerman is the owner of Energy Oasis.  This happens to be the premiere gym and spa in Richmond Hill.  She is a member of The Women’s Business Alliance of Richmond Hill.  She hosted our monthly meeting at her gym.  While we were there, she offered all the ladies in attendance a waived registration fee, 2 training sessions, and a 40 minute Swedish relaxation massage!  Woo Hoo!  I am in.

I had my orientation session with Kathy yesterday.  Now, I am no stranger to a gym - we just had divided paths for a while.  But yesterday was an eye opener.  I have always been strong, and I still am – but boy am I sore this morning.  And getting my heart rate up for the cardio part was easier than it should have been.  Can you say “out of shape”?

But, I am very excited and am dedicated to going back today – even if it is just for my massage  

I am curious though…the current challenge is not motivation to go, but scheduling it into my day.  See, I am a hair and makeup kind of girl.  It takes me between 30 to 45 minutes to get ready.  I am looking for some tips to get in and out of the gym quickly in that respect.  Got anything? 

Well, it looks like Em’ has enjoyed these last couple of posts being about her.  In an attempt to keep a firm grip on her position, she has decided to get sick.

There are few things that tug at my heart like a sick baby.  At this age, she can’t tell me what hurts, what she needs, or what she wants.  Except cuddles and a sippy cup.  Those work all the time.  And I love the cuddles…it kinda makes you wonder why they have to grow up.

I have some great friends.  I consider them to be my safety rope in the Chaos.  They keep me from going it alone.  I have been fortunate to make some really good ones – both here on the blogiverse, and in my local area.

Good friends challenge you.  They encourage you to be a better person. More than that, they expend of themselves to see that you succeed.

Lani and I email each other on a regular basis. There are no topics off limit. As such, they remain fairly private – we are both very responsible about what we will and won’t put on the net for anonymous viewing. However, we thought it would be neat to motivate each other to make positive difference – and those types of movements are incredibly blog worthy.

Last week, over on Making Life Work for You, I talked about personal responsibility.  It was the first attempt at an idea Lani and I have been brainstorming over. When she mentioned it, I immediately thought of the conversation Liz and Dawud are having. It’s cool – you should check it out.

So, this is home base. Whenever Lani or I become inspired to post about something we learned (or relearned), we’ll post it and link back here. We invite you to join us.

I was on a roll this weekend.

• I had finished reading The Secret some time ago. While I don’t buy into all of it, there was some encouraging stuff in there. Being intentional about how my brain works, where my thoughts go, and what my energy is focused on has been very helpful.
• My inbox is still at under 10 messages. Talk about GTD. The lesson here is the fewer times you can touch something (email message) the more productive you can be. Get the email, process the email, file it or delete it. Don’t let it hang around.
• After reading a few of Lyman’s post on Simpleology, I decided to check it out. I dig it. Deliberate, paced, and fun. The Daily Praxis has been most helpful. And Mark’s delivery is very funny – I like funny.

These things are working. They may not work for everybody, but they (with my tweaks) are working for me.

Tweaks…that’s where my train got derailed.

I have decided I am going to start The Reading Chair here at Beautiful Chaos. Why?

• I like to read smart stuff. There are all kinds of people reading smart stuff. I make a little note to read whatever the recommendation is, lose the paper, spend a ton of time trying to find the recommendation.
• I like to tell you about the stuff I read but I want the posts all in one place. Remember, I am trying to streamline certain aspects of my life.

Well, in an effort to do this, I got lost in the tweaks.

• Wow, I must have this new plug in.
• Look at this neat format idea.
• My blog just would not survive without this.

Hours later, I am no closer to standing up The Reading Chair than I was 15 minutes into the endeavor. Stupid.

So, here is my daily affirmation.

• I like the way Beautiful Chaos looks.
• Beautiful Chaos serves its function as a blog.
• Beautiful Chaos is user friendly and aesthetically pleasing just the way it is.
• I will save mindless tweaking for my free time.

Time wasters. We all have them. This is one of mine and it is sickening. It must be eradicated. Sounds overly dramatic, I know – unless you see all the “to dos” yesterday that suffered from my lack of management.

Did something else this morning. I changed the way my email runs. I can’t turn Outlook off – it has my schedule on it and I have set up some alarms to keep me on track. But there is no doubt that real time email is this shiny thing that glitters and I find it impossible to resist – time waster. Solution – I turned off the “automatic send/receive.” Yes, I am experiencing withdraws. Yes, I am twitching a bit. No, I will not turn it back on. I hope.