Every home office should have a cat, and here’s why:

• The occasional need for attention allows you to get away from your desk for 5 minutes so you can let the cat out, or put food out, or whatever
• When the cat requires more personal attention, the distraction of giving the cat a rub can help your productivity when you return to duty
• Cats are good to have around, as long as they don’t want to sleep on your lap

My cats prefer to sleep on my lap, but a few minutes of having me type over their heads is enough to drive them off to find a more peaceful spot.

Cats can also be entertaining, which provides further short-term distraction. My cat Chloe has always been fascinated by printers. If she hears it going from another room she will still, after all these years, go off to watch it. She especially enjoys the new one in the picture with the document feeder. She’s only tried once to climb on top of it, which disconnected the document feeder and was too disturbing for her to try again.

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Very productive day today. My blog comes up on my blog reader, so I read it this morning to see what I’d said I was going to do today, and I was further inspired. Or perhaps determined is a better word for it.

• I finished editing the article for Descent and sent it off.
• I made a serious start on my essay, so that it seems possible that I will be able to finish it.
• I learned enough about Word 2007 and the way it handles footnotes and the bibliography (separately, unfortunately) to be useful
• I learned enough about Word 2007′s so-called SmartArt (diagram drawing) to start on the diagrams for the essay
• I didn’t start on the client report but I’d done that the night before and decided that was enough.
• I did a load of washing (unplanned bonus!)

I think it works, you know, this making public announcements of what I’m going to do!

Tomorrow, instead of going into the city for the bi-monthly TMG User Group meeting I’m going to stay at home and work on my essay all day, with occasional breaks to go outside and enjoy the forecasted warm weather. I may even sit in the sun for half an hour and read a book about the colonial administration of the colonies of Australia between 1831 and 1855. It doesn’t get any better than that!

Word 2007 is a bit of a struggle but I’m getting there. The last essays I wrote were written using Office XP (is that what it was called?) and I had to put references in manually and I didn’t need to draw diagrams. Come to think of it, I started using OneNote. It was the version we were allowed to download as students of the University of Sydney, and it’s an ugly, cumbersome thing. It did work with Word, though. I can’t afford to upgrade it, and I haven’t found anything that has similar functionality. I wonder how it handles footnotes? Might be worth another look.

Does anyone use OneNote, or Word 2007, for genealogical writing?

By the way, I’m trying to keep the title on these posts consistent so that those of you you aren’t remotely interested in my daily tasks can ignore them.

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I’ve been reading Stephanie Dowrick’s Creative Journal Writing (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007) and it has reminded me how liberating and fulfilling writing a journal can be. Writing a blog is like writing a journal in that you write whatever is on your mind, and yet it is different because you are always conscious that someone may read your blog (hopefully) and so you are keeping your audience in mind, whereas with a journal it is for you and you alone. It doesn’t have to make sense to someone else, it can be defamatory or dishonest or whatever you like – it is just for you.

Writing a journal can clarify problems in your own mind, or take you to a level of creativity you didn’t know you were capable of. I’ve written a journal on and off since I was a teenager, and mostly it was of the problem-clarifying kind. Getting it down on paper means you have to think clearly and boil all those circular worries down into sentences. It gets it outside of yourself and enables you to look at it more objectively, with less emotion that can stop you seeing it properly. It can also give you ideas for solutions that don’t come when the problem is just going around and around in your head.

I haven’t written one for a few years now, and then I heard Stephanie on the radio the other night talking about journals and her new book and I was inspired to start again. I love to write – no-one who doesn’t would voluntarily start a blog – and the idea that I could introduce more creativity into my writing and my life was instantly appealing.

Just the thought of going out and buying a journal to write in, with nice paper and a proper cover, and deciding which pen, or colour, to use, was immensely satisfying, and actually going out and buying one was even more so. I’ve written in it twice so far, and I’m thinking that there is so much more I can do. I bought a sketchbook type so the pages are thick enough that I can write on both sides of the page without interference from the other side, which always bothers my about normal notebooks; and not having lines on the page means I can draw or write diagonally or in circles if I want to.

Stephanie’s book gives examples and exercises for unleashing the creativity we all have in there somewhere, and I’m looking forward to getting in there and trying them out.

Can writing a journal make me happy? I think so! I’ll let you know how I go.

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