July 2010

1. I am finished working for the weekend.
2. Coffee let me use his duvet so I could sleep under two duvets and ohmygod it was awesome. The weight, alone, made it worth the price of admission.
3. Running some errands with my husband and getting some cherry pop to drink.
4. Pierogies for dinner and a lovely salad. Mmmm, red onions!
5. My husband reminded me not to eat the red peppers (they upset my stomach).
6. Tonight I’ll sleep next to my beloved husband. YEAH!
7. The library’s collection of ebooks has not yet failed me. I keep finding stuff I’d like to read!
8. Big turtles. (Even if Coffee won’t let me get one and keep it in our bathtub.)
9. Watching Coffee try on running shoes. His feet make me laugh. (And he DID buy some, which clearly means the end of the world is nigh.)
10. Knowing how lucky I am.

1. The Sex.
2. Spending time with my husband, including the non-sex time, before heading to work is a really nice thing.
3. Heaps of ebooks to read. Now I just need to find TIME to read them!
4. Clean laundry – already put away.
5. Sleeping and being awakened by my beloved husband on his return from work.

I am trying to figure out how to sleep when I’m doing the overnight (midnight to 8 a.m.) work shifts. I am definitely over-thinking this but I can’t seem to figure out what’d be ideal.

I have to be awake for the shifts, so that’s obviously not the time to sleep, but otherwise I need to figure out some sort of schedule that makes sense.

Today is Friday. Tonight I go in to work at 11:50 p.m. and I return home around 8:15 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow night I go in to work at 11:50 p.m. and I return home around 8:15 a.m. on Sunday morning.

I want to maximize my awake-with-everyone-else time – so I don’t want to spend all day Saturday or all day Sunday asleep. At the same time, I need to make sure I’m not exhausted for either shift as a result of not getting enough, appropriately-timed, sleep.

My first thought is to break the sleep up – to ‘nap’ from around 6pm to 10:30pm tonight. Work. Come home and sleep from around 9am to 1pm.

But then do I sleep again from 6pm to 10:30 on Saturday night? That only gives me about 5 awake hours on Saturday afternoon which seems very short. On the flip side, I’ll want to go to sleep at my normal 11:30-ish pm on Sunday night so I can wake up at the normal time on Monday morning.

Normally I’m awake for about 16 or 17 hours straight during the day – from a bit before 7 am ’til around midnight – so it would make sense, then, that I could be awake for 8 hours of work and then some more time, right? Except that I don’t get the full sleeping time between shifts and awakedness. And, again, I want to maximize my awake time to correspond with doing things I want to do with the people with whom I’d like to do them.

I want to figure this out before school starts again in September – if I’m keeping this every-other-week overnight shift thing, I need to make it work properly.

This is just stupid.

Factors: I have earplugs that work and can make my bedroom reasonably dark for sleeping. Coffee is fine with keeping the kids from stomping around above me while I rest. I do not have any other obligations this weekend (nothing structured, at least) so I can sleep whenever it makes the most sense. I am clearly over-thinking this. Someone, quick, slap me.

I spent most of yesterday getting the aquarium up and running. Coffee had scoured everything with vinegar and a scrubby, taken it outside to blast with the hose (and brought it back inside), and the rest was up to me to handle. Much of what I needed was still in reasonable shape from JubJub’s habitat – the tank, gravel, one filter and some plants – but I needed a few other things to get everything going again.

I took the small kid to the aquarium store to help me pick up the under gravel filters and the assorted plants and the air hoses and gang valves and other doo-dads. We ended up spending a lot more time (and money, of course) than I had anticipated but I found myself downright giddy at the end result.

Two filters are running right now – I still need to get the third up – and the gravel and plants are in place. I filled the tank with water last night and spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at the bubbles and the gently floating plant leaves.

My plan is still to pick up two goldfish – the least fancy I can find without resorting to the (generally unhealthy) feeder fish. I like the appearance of the fancy, of course, but they often have health problems as a result of their genetic quirks – and I want two healthy, long-living fish. I also want something very low-maintenance since I’ll eventually be back at school and working.

I need to get a few more tank decorations in place to provide adequate cover, and then, once the water has sat for a few days, I’ll be good to go. Wheeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

1. Today is Kelly‘s birthday – and I, for one, am glad she was born. I am really enjoying reading about her adventures in teaching and watching her stretch and grow.
2. The aquarium, nearly ready to use, is making me mighty cheerful. Bonus points for the small kid helping me run errands to get to this point.
3. A much better day than yesterday.
4. My beloved husband.
5. Grape-scented hand soap.

1. Today was a flat-out awful day – which is not a GiST – but nearly everyone I encountered cheered me up a little bit in their own way and it helped. A lot.
2. I organized the shit out of my office. It’s not finished but man, it’s getting closer. Coffee then took a load of stuff to Value Village which cleared out more space for me to .. clear more space.
3. My beloved husband cleaned the aquarium for me. I’m gonna’ get some goldfish! (I miss the sound of water in the office and I miss watching JubJub swim around – and I am not interested in fancy fish at all.)
4. I spent some time weeding the vegetable garden today even though I didn’t want to do it. It’s about 1/3 finished, I’d estimate, and I’m aiming to get more done tomorrow evening when it’s cooler outside again.
5. My husband who is fine with just sitting, next to me, rubbing my back or holding my hand or just letting me feel his presence when I’m miserable. I am loved.

For the past while I’ve been feeling a building sense of discontent that I can’t put my finger on, can’t quite identify, and can’t attribute to PMS. Everything feels grey.

This morning I woke up with my head empty; I could, I’m positive, just sit in one place and stare at a wall for the entire day. My motivation is non-existent and I do not want to do anything. I have been trying to prod myself along (hence, questions about sewing) and it’s the equivalent of shoving a broken-down car – it moves a foot or two and then stops again.

Coffee left for work and I sat down to cry for a while, empty-headed. Not thinking about anything, really, just weeping for the sake of it, I guess.

This doesn’t bode well.

1. Finding an enormous zucchini in my (badly neglected, full-of-weeds) garden!
2. Coffee made dinner tonight. (He does this many nights but today I really and truly didn’t want to go through the effort of cooking anything so it was particularly nice.)
3. Running errands successfully.
4. An enormous salad for lunch.
5. Clean clothes.

Earlier this week I was rambling on to my beloved husband about how I wanted to find purple nail polish in a very specific shade of purple that, thus far, I have seen only on the inside of my own head. Colours inside my head are very difficult to describe for some reason.

Anyway, we determined that I already own several bottles of purple; I do not own the correct shade of “grape” that I want.

Today I was running errands with the small child and we took a quick look for the ‘right’ shade of purple. He very helpfully pointed out ALL the purples available and, alas, no dice.

He went off to sit by the blood pressure-checking machine. I went down another aisle and, there it was. The right shade of purple ON SALE.

The best part? The name of the shade is “VIOLET”.

Oh yeah.

–

There are several ‘projects’ looming inside my head lately and the problem with every single one of them is that they are going to require sustained attention. I do not do well with that sort of thing, preferring as I do the whole “instant gratification” concept.

On that note, it has taken me about 30 years to be okay with my need for things to wrap up neatly in a short period of time; it’s not a judgment, it’s just how I am. I love that some people can work on a project for years and years but I’m pretty much good for an hour, tops, before I get bored and wander away.

So I have these ‘projects’ that I want to accomplish and they have multiple steps and there is no way any of them will be completed in an hour, or even two hours, or even a single afternoon and my god, I just cannot motivate myself to start any of them.

It doesn’t help that I’m working the overnight shifts for the next two weekends, in a row, and have worked myself up into some sort of unhappy anticipatory state over that, either. I keep thinking there’s no point in starting something right now because the next few weekends are going to require me to sleep during normal-people-hours and meh meh meh and eeeeergh. Holy crap, I bore myself just thinking about this.

I really miss Ritalin sometimes.

–

I have no idea who nominated me, or how I got there, but it would appear that my blog post about euthanasia made it to Five Star Friday. I should not have paused this blog post to check my stats because now I feel.. shy.

HEY NEW PEOPLE! Hi! Sadly, I don’t write too many long-winded, interesting posts these days.. but feel free to stick around if you like and I’ll vaguely entertain you with my occasional rant! :)

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The company where my beloved husband is employed has recently moved to a new office building – because he pretty much works for the only company that’s still expanding and hiring and buying other companies and amazing stuff like that.

The move, however, means the aforementioned beloved husband is not walking to work anymore and I am not driving him to work on occasion. He is actually driving his own car again.

In case you thought that my (randomly-occurring, mostly existential) anxiety attacks had faded, let me just assure you that the idea of my husband commuting by car every day is making me a titch crazy. I do not approve of this in the slightest because, seriously, have you been on the roads lately?

(Related, while running the errands earlier with the small kid, he – out of nowhere – shouted, “GET OFF MY LAWN!” in a grouchy old man voice. I high-fived him for it.)

–

A friend gave me a heap of clothing for the boys recently – I love love love hand-me-downs and, if I may be blunt, it saves us a shitload of money when the kids are growing like lunatics. As I was sorting it into sizes (so I can put them into plastic storage bins that are labeled with those sizes) (and doesn’t that just make me sound all organized and fancy and like I have a clue what I’m doing over here?) (HA!) I noted several hoodies amongst the boy-sized jeans and things.

Hoodies.

I confess: I took the hoodies.

There is nothing I love more than a good hoodie on a cool autumn day.

Hoodies, like fancy cookies and delicate, fragile things, are wasted on children who just leave them at school (“I don’t KNOW where I put it..”) or get weird stains on them (“I don’t KNOW how the marker wrote my name all over it..”).

(Okay, I didn’t take ALL the hoodies. Just some.)

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Every time I cut my hair shorter, I think, “Man, this is SWEET! Less shampoo, less conditioner, less time to dry, less cold wet stuff stuck to my neck…” and then, inevitably, I wake up a year later with hair that’s a foot longer, snarled in knots, and nearly hyperventilate at the idea of cutting it. What’s THAT all about?

(Related: if time allows, we’re gonna’ dye my hair purple tonight!)

–

Do you watch “Big Bang Theory“? Because it pretty much sums up so many little plot themes in my life – it’s how I imagine Coffee’s time at Caltech and is reasonably representative of my friends in high school and I spend less time laughing while watching it and more time just nodding in agreement.

That, and it’s awesome to listen to Coffee’s comments (about math, physics, whatever!) as we watch.

–

Okay, my husband is going to be getting in his car to come home soon, I think. Time for me to go do a voodoo dance, chant quietly and make strange offerings to the traffic/safety/whatever gods in the hopes of delivering him home safely.

Or take some Ativan. Whatever works.

I have two sewing projects that I want to attack – and I need some advice on how to proceed. If you know HOW or if you know of a good tutorial (online, preferred, since my budget for books is TINY these days) I would be SO eternally grateful.

The first is taking a men’s t-shirt and making it curvier like a women’s t-shirt. My thinking on this is that I just need to use my own favourite-fitting shirt as a template on top of the men’s shirt – trace, cut and sew. Am I right or wrong? (I realize there might be a need for some tweaking on this to get it fitting properly.) I have a few shirts on which to practice before I get to the ‘goods’ – but I’d still really appreciate ANY advice.

The second is taking a men’s dress shirt and tailoring it to be a women’s dress shirt – again, the same concept of adding some ‘curve’ to the shirt sides. This one seems like it’d be the more challenging of the two, and I only have ONE shirt on which to practice – so I’d REALLY like some advice before I start. I don’t have an existing dress shirt with which to create a template, either, so that’s an added complication.

Any ideas?