minutiae

Minutiae. I had to look up how to spell that.

My life is overwhelmed with that stuff right now, teeny tiny details. It's making my brain hurt.

I just cleaned up my email inbox, because I had 658 unread emails in there, not counting the spam, mostly crap from companies I shop online with or somebody trying to sell me something or updates from websites I belong to. I rue the day when I let my personal email become my everything email. I spent as much time setting up new preferences and unsubscribing to crap as I did cleaning up that darn inbox. It was crazy. But that clean little nothing next to the word INBOX makes me happier than anything I've done all week. Month.

Because I'm a readaholic and an information hoarder, I still have hundreds of unread emails, but they're the ones like longreads or delancey place, which give me excerpts of books to read which come in real handy when I have my iphone but not my kindle or a book and I'm sitting and waiting somewhere. I probably have a lifetime's worth, but can't bring myself to miss reading them someday. But I stuck them in a folder so they're not mocking me in my inbox. It was getting real hard to find the important stuff.

Like the bazillion emails it is taking to begin this business venture my husband talked me into. He went through a massive shakeup at his company, one result being a niche opening up just perfect for a woman owned business run by me to swoop in and start selling shit I know next to nothing about to people I've never met. So far, not so bad, but it's been almost two decades since I've had my head inside government contracts and regulations and it's a wonder to me that anything, anywhere ever, ever gets accomplished.

Long story short, I'm selling specialty chemicals to people who make them into products to sell to end users. Not such a stretch, since my husband has been formulating and manufacturing and selling this stuff for 20 years, and I've been using many of them for that long. I am, if nothing else, a loyal customer of the no frills, environmentally friendly wholesale stuff we, now I, sell. But using a chemical product is a long way from selling it, that's the big thing the minutiae is teaching me.

I've had my head inside web site setup, accounting software, contracts, proposals and the neverending mystery that is running a business in Illinois. I've learned more than my brain can hold and there's so much more to go. I'm not good at being a patient learner, and I'm finding that the after 50 brain is a lot more stubborn than the younger model.

So much minutiae. The devil's in the details, that's for sure. My husband loves to say you have to be sure you're sure because otherwise that's how astronauts end up getting killed. I think watching Apollo 13 got that stuck in his head, the excruciating attention to detail - physics and a ton of math - that let us put people in space and then bring them back safely. Screw up something miniscule, like the freezing temperature of an o-ring on a seal somewhere, and the Challenger disaster is the result. So I'm not putting anybody into space, but I'm trying to keep customers happy and regulatory agencies satisfied and make some money and I'm still in my learning curve and  even on my shittiest days I tell myself that at least I didn't kill any astronauts. Ha.

And that's why, today, with paperwork piled up like crazy and so much stuff to do, that I instead spent almost two hours cleaning up my email accounts. The good news is I've got the business emails running through the company web site and now that I've learned how to work it, they don't mingle in my crazy life inbox anymore. One small victory for me.

Here's a tiny question  - is anybody else missing the dashboard/new post links that used to be on the top of the page in blogger? They come, they go. For the life of me, I don't know why they disappear, or how they decide to come back and I feel stupid bumbling around trying to find my news feed or write a new post. Not that I've been writing that much lately, but still.

Well this is certainly a long post to talk about the minute details of my day.  I feel like my blog is a dusty nick knack on the shelf of my life, and I am a little guilty about that. I do what I can. Even if it's checking in with some minutiae. I still can't remember how to spell that and I've typed it what - 5 times? My brain isn't interested in that detail. Thank goodness nobody's life depends on it.

Hope all your little details are going just fine.