Sunday, February 24, 2008

Not The Only One

It's almost the end of February and I'm still just not feeling the bloggy thing consistently. I finished the year off strong, but since the new year I haven't been posting or reading much. I kinda figured I was just busy with work and such, as some changes are going on there. Plus we're trying to get ourselves organized at home to deal with the first year of filing our taxes jointly, and we're working on a way to shorten my commute in this downturn of the economy (selling our place and moving is not looking like an option). But I think its more then just being busy.

Then today, Eric was busy starting on a design for a new client so I booted up the ol' laptop. I had been trying to stay away from the computer on the weekends unless it's to do household business stuff so bloggy catch up hasn't been happening... until this weekend.

With over 500 posts to read in bloglines, I started in. I admit I skimmed through some, and outright skipped others (sorry Dooce and Maggie.... you didn't make the cut, I know you're crying about the loss of ad revenue so I'll give you some linky love just for funsies). I didn't comment much to aide in the mass reading venture so I apologize for the silent viewing. Since the exchange of comments is one part of blogging I truly enjoy, I don't usually like to go so long without commenting, but that's the way it goes sometimes. I have friends who have called and emailed me directly who I have yet to reply to, so I've been doing an all around bad job at keeping in touch.

But there was something that I noticed even with my most consistent bloggy friends, many haven't been writing either! Did everyone burn out with NaBloPoMo last year? Is everyone doing a re-evaluation of the time they spend in front of the glowing box? I know many people will make a resolution to post more, but perhaps some people made the resolution to post less.

I don't really feel pressure to post everyday, which is great but I know that we have a community out here and in order to be a part of the community which I enjoy, I have to participate. I still enjoy blogging so I don't foresee quiting. When I post more, my writing improves, I feel connected with some wonderful people, and I find I'm more focused and can process all that is going on in my life. So I'm still in it.... are you?

Monday, February 11, 2008

That'll Teach Me

Mental Note - Just because you did it as a kid, doesn't mean you should do it as an adult.

It's 3am-ish and I'm up with a tummy ache. I'm thinking that since it's only been a few days after dealing with some sort of tummy/etc. "imbalance", licking the spatula and bowl from making cake batter and frosting is a bad idea. I don't think today is going to be as productive as I had thought a few hours ago.

Ugh....

Someone Stop This Woman!

Whoaa! What a domestic weekend I've had! I haven't had that productive of a weekend in ages and it feels great! Well, my hands are a little dry and weathered, but mostly I'm feeling pretty good about now.

After feeling pretty crappy the last few days and Eric working a really hard and long day on Friday, I thought we'd take it easy this weekend. Sure that was the plan, but I woke up on Saturday morning with a fire lit under me. Eric had to meet up with a potential new client in the morning (which he totally scored! Whoo!), so I started the morning off with the ambition to wash everything on the bed, including the pillows, mattress pad, bed skirt, everything, AND scrub the bathrooms top to bottom.

Thanking the good inventors of yesteryear, everything I could fit into the washing machine (and even some things I probably should have taken to a laundr-o-mat) were clean and smelling fresh by the end of the day. I'm sure the Electric Company will be contacting the authorities to make sure we aren't growing some unlawful plants in the coming days, with all of the power I used this weekend. I honestly can't say I've ever used the washer and dryer that many times in one day, and I hope not to do it again anytime soon.

Seeing as I still don't own a mop (nasty things that they are), I tackled those bathrooms on my hands and knees, scrub brush, sponges, towels and even a tootbrush, in hand. The walls were cleaned, the floors were scrubbed, even getting into all of those tight corners and grooves of the baseboards. I'm sure some strange yoga position was achieved to get to the nooks and crannies back behind the toilets. Can we say gleaming? Oh yes, even a day later... still gleaming. I was dreading putting the cat litter box back into the downstairs bathroom as I wanted to keep the shine alive a little longer.... but even after a day of use and some apparently gleeful digging by the cats, a little round about with the broom and it's back to shine-city.

Today I pulled out all of the stops and re-caulked the bathtub, the sink and along the floor. Then I did a little touch up of the tub glazing because I dropped something in there and chipped the glazing we spent $700 on a few years ago and chips aren't covered in their warranty, OF COURSE! This means that I'll have to shower at work tomorrow and Eric showers after he works, so hopefully the shower will be ready for him when he gets home tomorrow night or else he's gonna just have to be stinky and will dirty up that clean bed of ours. (sigh) Perhaps I'll keep this crazy streak going and even get to work early enough for a work out, since I'm going to have to shower there anyway. Hmmm....

Amazingly I was cleaning up my bathroom adventures by lunchtime, so we had a lunch outing with my mother and then headed to her house to play some cards. Can I tell you how much I miss playing cards? Growing up, every Sunday after church, we'd play cards with my grandmother, so you can imagine my dismay when I find out that my love did NOT grow up playing cards so he doesn't get (and therefore doesn't like) the games we've tried to get him to play. To appease him, we usually play word games like Scrabble, but for Christmas he said he'd try to play my mom's favorite, Squeak (at least that's what we call it). We've played a few times since Christmas and today he even asked to go another round and later said he really enjoyed it. Perhaps we'll get him to enjoy card games after all.

When we got home, I ventured into the kitchen to do me some baking. An Angel food cake for my love's birthday tomorrow, and some dark chocolate mini cupcakes with cream cheese frosting for the folks in the office. I opened the oven door too soon on the Angel Food cake so it fell a little, but I think it'll be just fine. And I played with the oven temp for the mini cupcakes and discovered that 325 does not a lovely domed mini cupcake make. Infact, it made for flat, wide topped, and slightly sunken in cakes, but still tasty. The second batch turned out far better at 350, and yes I remembered to make note of that on my recipe (which I had clearly forgotten to do last time since I had gone through the same temperature experiment before). I loaded far too much frosting on the cupcakes as well, but I'll just wait to see if anyone actually complains.

Ok... and now I can say I even posted something. Phew! What an awesome weekend! I could say I don't know how I have so much energy right now, but I have a feeling a few licked clean spatulas and "test" cupcakes might have something to do with it. Hopefully the sugar high crashes soon so I can get me some sweet sleep. After all, if I'm going to get into the office to work out in the gym before showering and keeping this productivity going on into the work week, I'm going to need some rest.

Friday, February 08, 2008

Whadup y'all

So um... it's been a month since I've written anything here. I've wanted to. I've meant to. But it just never happened.

That cold I had was passed onto my husband, and hung on for a few weeks. I'm always afraid when my husband gets a cold because he has had some pretty scary sinus infections in the past. We kept up on the sinus rinses and regularly taking decongestants. I don't like to pump the pills, but if it means keeping the cold from turning into a possible surgery, we'll take the pills. It's "mostly" gone now. Phew! (Although I've been home sick the last few days with some sort of tummy badness, I haven't been able to really eat yet but thankfully that seems to be passing now too).

In the last month, I've thrown myself into work and pretty much stopped blogging all together. Obviously no writing, and only a tiny bit of reading. It's been really odd. I still think of post ideas and things I want to write about throughout the day, but taking the time to write just didn't seem to take a high enough priority.

Every few days I have received a comment or an email from my bloggy friends checking in. I realized that the last few posts I wrote about were about depression or possibly depressing subjects. I hope I didn't worry anyone with my silence. Perhaps concentrating on work allowed me to focus on other things, but lately I've been feeling pretty good (minus the cold and tummy ache).

My little rss feed aggregator keeps reminding me of how much blogging fun I have been missing. A while ago I gave up on it telling me I had an ever growing number of posts to read and I marked them all read. And somehow since then it has already racked up 500+ more posts for me to read. Sorry, folks but I'm not going to be able to catch up entirely. I'd like to, and I'll try, but it's not looking likely.

I'm going to try to re-introduce blogging into my world... but slowly. I have a lot of other things going on, and although I really enjoy the connections I've gained through blogging, I can't let it get in the way of life away from the glowing screen. Seriously, I don't know how everyone does it! One way I'm hoping to make it work, is by getting back into commuting via the train. With Google Reader's ability to read offline, I may be able to keep up with ya'll that have your feeds set to publish the full post, but that means I won't be online to comment. And if I can find a seat, I can always write on the train which I find to be a great segue between work and home.

I hope everyone has been doing well, and I hope to get caught up with everyone really soon!