After twenty years of marriage, my wife has learned to pick her battles. She knows I’m not going to have a neat car – nor a neat studio. She knows my shirt tail will be hanging out at least 60 % of the time. She knows I will never make the U.S. Precision Shaving Team. (I tend to shave while reading Opera News, which never works too well.) And she knows that when it comes to taking on projects, “just say no” is not exactly my motto. She has learned to live with those faults – which by the way are just a few items on what is an exceedingly long list.
But for some time now she has been bound and determined to haul me kicking and screaming into the 21st century when it comes to my calendar. I’m not sure why, but when it comes to keeping track of my schedule, I am more of an hourglass, sun dial kind of guy. . . decidedly analog. . . fond of my pen and paper calendar and suspicious of anything too technologically fancy. I suppose the biggest reason for my hesitancy is that I’m pretty much a moron about such things, and the thought of trying to learn the in’s and out’s of one more fancy electronic, cyber doo-hickey is not exactly my idea of fun. But Kathy has been convinced for some time now that it would make all kinds of sense for me to move to an electronic calendar – and after yet another screw up involving a voice lesson, I realized that I needed to at least give this a try.
I had actually seen a couple of Google calendars a few weeks back when I was asking for the class schedules of my voice students (to schedule their lessons) and a couple of them had me look up their on line calendars. They looked fun but complicated- the kind of thing that my young colleague Dimitri would master in thirty seconds but which I would find completely stupefying.
Or so I thought.
Last night, I finally gave in and decided to give this new- fangled electronic calendar a try. So I sat myself down on the living room couch with my laptop, with Kathy close by if anything went wrong . . . and slowly but surely I started building my calendar. It proved not to be as difficult as I feared – and as an unexpected bonus, Google calendars feature a wonderful array of colors. Once I realized that I could label things by color (Carthage lessons are red, opera rehearsals are yellow, choral rehearsals are blue, WGTD interviews are green, etc.) I actually started to fall in love with this way of doing things. I can also blend my calendar with, for instance, the Carthage events calendar, to help me avoid double-booking myself. And this calendar is laid out in such a way that I am likely to keep much better track of when I am especially busy, and may be able to avoid those catastrophically wild spots in the calendar when I allow way too many things to pile up on top of one another.
But best of all, because Kathy can consult the calendar, add to it, etc. this no longer seems like the scary undertaking that it once did. We will be a team.
That’s why I’m finally ready to put away my sun dial.