Month: June 2022

If memory serves correctly, it was April of last year when I mentioned the Obsidian application on this blog, and I’ve spent a year or so putting notes and references into the application, but not really using it as a knowledge management tool.
That started to change about a month ago, and really gained momentum in this past week.
During May I came across a post on the Obsidian forums from Nick Milo. Amongst many other things, Nick has a website called Linking Your Thinking, along with templates and classes to help you organize your personal information. I downloaded the latest LYT toolkit, and worked through the notes and some of the You Tube tutorials.
In the same way I had that Zettelkasten epiphany last year, I finally found a structure that works for me. There are some differences from the base LYT toolkit, but I began to see how I could use Maps of Content to pull data from all over the repository and show it in one place. Explaining the overall structure is outside the scope of this post, and the Linking Your Thinking site explains it much better 🙂
What is in scope for this post is the feedback I got from a short story I wrote about a year ago. The story is called A Roll of the Dice, and tells of the experiences of British soldiers serving with Simon Bolivar’s army to liberate South America from Spanish rule. The feedback was that an incident in the story was not believable and would never have happened.
But it did happen.
I used the actual events as the jumping off point for the story, and went to prove it. Nothing came up in the research books on my bookshelves, and that left me scratching my head. Where had I read about it? A day or so later as I was flicking through my kindle, I found two titles about the wars of liberation in South America. Buried in one of them was the reference I needed.
And then my mind did its own linking magic.
I’ve already catalogued a lot of reference articles in Obsidian for both South American and the Exiles in Babylon. It made sense to extend that catalog to all relevant publications on my bookshelves, in kindle, and Apple Books.
And I’ve linked the book reference to a note on the short story, so next time I can get to it immediately.
Well, that’s the plan!

I was in the grocery store earlier this week, working through the list of things we needed, when I realized the list also had several items we already have, but wanted to make sure we had enough.
That made me ask the question of myself – what is enough?
The answer, as usual, it depends.
In the time before the covid pandemic, I’d have a couple of cans of sweet corn in the pantry, and the same for peas and black beans, or packets of rice. Now I have five or six of each, plus several packs of chicken and other meat stored in the freezer.
All of this extra stock was driven by the inability to buy those items. We went for a period of maybe six weeks where finding chicken in our stores was impossible. Similarly with peas and sweet corn.
For the past month it’s been eggs.
I hear the refrain about supply-chain issues, but if the manufacturer can supply peas with onions, peas with mushrooms, or peas with jalapenos, why can’t they provide peas with more peas?
It’s not just foodstuffs or paper goods. We’ve seen empty shelves of laundry detergent, dryer sheets, and air fresheners.
As a result, my shopping patterns have changed.
I’m more aware of what’s not on the shelves, or available in the produce section. If it’s an item I use regularly, I make sure I have a good supply in the pantry. Not so easy with fresh fruit of vegetables, but I’ve learned the earlier you get to the store, the more likely you are to find broccoli, or peppers or onions.
I’m hopping these supply-chain “issues” resolve themselves, and my patterns change again, but to be honest, I’m not confident.