The week between Christmas and New Year’s is usually one of my favorites. It feels like stolen time, time off the calendar, set aside for reflection and recharge. This year… not so much. The kids are off school, I’m exhausted, tight on my deadlines and I’m not finding the time to take proper care of myself, let alone time for luxuries like New Year’s Resolutions or whatnot. I’m fighting to keep my chin up and to keep from giving in to a certain amount of self-pity.

Well… as is perhaps obvious from this post, I’m losing that last battle. For the moment, anyway.

I feel like an ass for complaining. I have a very good life and a family I adore.

I’m just tired, I guess.

All right. Enough of that.

Hey, look–shiny things!

• The Fantastic Fangirls named both Matt and I in their year-end round-up and I couldn’t be more pleased. We get a lot of support from the FFs and I’m particularly grateful for it because I’ve learned so much from them over the last year. Bright, funny women, that bunch. It looks like Laurenn, Tallulah and I are going to see Sigrid (and possibly Caroline?) at Wiscon come spring, and I’m very much looking forward to it.
• Speaking of the FF, Jennifer is pulling double-duty as a correspondent for Newsarama, where I made her list of BEST OF 2010. Sweeeet!
• The Guerilla Geek podcast “Dept H” gave OSBORN big love in their ep labelled 7.1. (And hey! Something I planted just to amuse myself got caught. Nice. Gotta love a careful reader.)
• EDITED TO ADD: Hey, Multiversity Comics gave Osborn 2 (out yesterday at your local comic book shop or available online from Midtown Comics) a solid review as well.
• With the release of the trade paperback, Chuck BB and I are feeling another wave of love for the CBGB COUNT 5 OR 6 story, here from none other than Blair Butler… which pretty much rules.
• Oh! And The Comics Journal liked our piece too. Nice.

Oh, one more thing: today’s my mom’s birthday. Happy birthday, Mama.

Okay, then. I now return you to your regularly scheduled moping.

This has been big around our house for months. Can’t wait for you to read it!

Chilli Sauces from Singapore, originally uploaded by Kelly Sue.

Fraction’s home from Singapore and look what he brought me!!

I feel loved. And spicy.

(Thanks to the fellas at Here Be Geeks for the cheat sheet and the hot sauce connection.)

So here’s a software/workflow question:

I’m on a mac.

I would like to be able to group different kinds of files into folders (or a larger document) for easy reference. I know there is a way to do this–probably multiple ways to do this–that I’m too clueless to be aware of. So… for instance, we’ve got a trip planned for March. (And another for May and another for June and another for July…you get the idea.) I’ve got emails, itineraries, links, packing lists, etc. Right now, the emails are just in my archive with a billion other emails. The documents are easy enough to organize in folders, but links…?

I’m tempted to open OmniOutliner documents called “Trip A” or whatever and attach emails and whatnot to it, but I wonder if there’s a better way.

(I should also probably mention that I use OmniFocus as a task manager.)

Similarly… Osborn. I’ve got art and emails and drafts–there are now a bazillion emails w/r/t this project and they’re all in one big OSBORN folder in mail and when I need to find something in particular, it’s not exactly at my fingertips.

How do you all organize these kinds of things?