The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I take all of the passages that I've highlighted in a Kindle book and either stick them in Evernote or format them for Google Sheets. It probably won't surprise you, based on my penchant for paperless everything, that I prefer to read books on the Kindle.  I still miss some things about physical books, but for me, the benefits of reading on a Kindle far outweigh them.  In particular, I like the search function and the highlight function.  Since I do most of my reading in bed, I really like not having to wrestle with a highlighting pen and a heavy book while reclining.  You might have noticed, if you highlight like I do, that even when you are on the Kindle app for iPad, you can't just copy and paste passages of a book that you want to share. Probably for copyright reasons.   That said, what Amazon DOES have is a unique website for you that compil...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share how I get organized and stay on top of my assignments for my part-time grad school program.  First of all, let me just say that although my life seems hectic to me, it is no where NEAR what some of my fellow students are experiencing.  There are lots of folks who are part-time students, working full time, and raising small children, some of them as single parents. Hats off to them.  That said, I think my methodology could be helpful for anyone — regardless of how crazy your schedule is.   I started grad school this fall, so I’m still working through some of the tools I’m using. I started out with a different organizing system than the one I use for everyday life and promptly discarded it after a couple of months.  Life is too crazy to have to check multiple systems.  If you’ve seen any of my ADHD videos, you’ll know that I use Toodledo for a task l...

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock with the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share how I plan big projects out using Toodledo and Google Calendar.   Okay - you have a big project looming and you are doing EVERYTHING you can to avoid getting started. Where do you even start?  We all know that awful saying about how to eat an elephant.  Well, of course that is how you have to handle big projects — one bite at a time.  So, the first thing you do is give yourself a 30 minute task — today or a couple of days in the future — to sit down and break down the individual tasks making up the project. I do this on a Google spreadsheet — I’ll  link  to a sample of the one I use for brainstorming.  You need to break it down into doable tasks and estimate how long each will take.  Let me give you an example.  I have a 15-page term paper due for one of my grad school classes this semester.  It’s about 5 weeks out from the due date...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, let’s talk about the conversation you should have with your teen girl about clothing choices and the male gaze.  Every generation of parents tries to prevent their girls from making risky clothing choices.  When I was growing up, my parents preferred this look to this one — the late 80s were horrendous.  Unfortunately, girls get positive feedback for wearing skimpy outfits and they get shunned for looking too prudish and basic.  But, as we all know, it’s a very narrow and precarious tightrope to walk — too skimpy and they get hate for being extra and slutty.   Girls of every generation have learned to nibble in from the edges on our rules.  I honestly NEVER thought I’d let I child of mine wear Daisy Dukes OR that I would ever be persuaded by the argument that everyone is wearing them. But I’ll be darned if they aren’t all wearing them!  Now we are quibbl...

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how I use the Felt App from my iPad to send beautiful handwritten, personalized greeting cards and thank you notes without ever getting up from my chair.  Perhaps this is a little antiquated. After all, I’m someone who retrieves the snail mail from my mailbox approximately once per week. It usually looks like this. I’m pretty sure my mailman hates me.  But for me, there are some occasions when a text or email just won’t do.  Thank yous are always better in print.  Plus, I have some traditional older folks in my life who insist on greeting cards to celebrate occasions. Now, this is something I didn’t grow up with. My parents did not send greeting cards.  They were cheap in almost every way, so we tended to make cards from scratch.  So, I still prefer to send something a little more personalized than just a signed greeting card. And now, I have found an a...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll show you how to quickly turn an email, or really anything printable, into a PDF on your iPad.  Occasionally, I need to turn an email or photo into a PDF.  Maybe I need to upload it to Google Drive or draw on it.  There are workarounds for photos. If your email isn’t long, you can use one of those workarounds.  But for long emails, if I try to cut and paste the email into a PDF creating app and the formatting turns whacky, up until now I’ve been out of luck. I finally stumbled onto a hidden solution for this.  See the problem is that the native iPad email app doesn’t give you a share button.  So, say you have a long email with a bunch of formatting like this one.  You want to turn it into a PDF so that you can mark it up or save it or whatever.  If you try to copy and paste into Notability for example, you lose all of the images and formatting. ...