Author: Average Jane

I should be at work right now, or at least on the road. Unfortunately, I’ve only been awake for about five minutes. Yes, it’s one of those days.

I’ll be running around frantically all day trying to complete work projects early so I can get my party errands run. The specifics of those errands are the only things rattling around in my brain right now anyway, and believe me, you wouldn’t be interested.

Have a great Friday and I’ll give a full report of what it’s like to keep control over a crowd of 60+ friends and find places to put their food while singing from my back deck. I doubt it will be as weird as I just made it sound…

Yesterday was a red-letter day because I got caught up on a time-consuming project at work, just before the deadline. Maybe today I’ll have time to go through the hundreds of e-mails in my In-Box and winnow them down to what’s still important. That’s always a scary process: I tend to find ones I’d forgotten about from two months back that say things along the lines of, “Jane, please take the initiative on this and get it sorted out a.s.a.p.” Heh, heh.

We’re still having our big, outdoor party on Saturday. For a while, the long-range weather report was predicting rain on Saturday, but they’ve stopped doing that. Not much is happening as far as party prep right now, except that I have one last band practice tonight with my husband’s band and one quickie practice tomorrow night with my old band. Hubby is leaving work at noon on Friday to run party-related errands and I’m thinking of following suit.

I’m going to cut things short today because I’m tired, yet I woke up late, and I still want to get to work early (by way of Starbucks, ideally). Have a lovely Thursday!

Over the past few years, I’ve had a rocky relationship with cars. If I were smart, I’d still be driving my 1991 Toyota Pickup. It was the first vehicle I ever bought new, and I bought it cheap: no stereo, no cigarette lighter, and lots of blank spaces on the dash that hinted at other missing features. I put well over 100,000 miles on it and it never broke down. Even the original battery lasted about eight years!

I put the truck out to pasture and finally sold it, still in good shape except for a little rust, when I bought a 1999 Toyota RAV4. I bought it new, too, and ordered it in dark, metallic green with lots of fun, little extras that I’d missed while driving the truck for so many years. My plan was to keep it until it dissolved into a puddle of rust, but an errant teenaged driver threw a wrench in that idea. One afternoon as my husband and I headed to a football game, a girl in a compact car darted out directly in front of us. My RAV4 didn’t look terribly banged up, but the body shop and insurance company thought otherwise.

That was the beginning of my bad car luck. I took the insurance settlement and purchased a 1997 BMW 318i convertible. I had a lot of reservations about it from the start and should really have thought it through more thoroughly before buying. For one thing, a woman who has assiduously avoided tanning her entire life really does not need to suddenly start exposing her 30+ year-old skin to solar radiation. But I bought it anyway, and drove it for a while in relative enjoyment (albeit with the top up most of the time).

At this point I was running my own business and my finances were getting rocky. The car seemed unnecessarily valuable and I decided I would sell it, buy an older and sportier car, and use the extra money to pay a bunch of bills. Unfortunately, that decision transpired around the time that, unbeknownst to me, the used car market tanked. I finally sold the BMW, but I lost money in the deal.

I took my sad little pile of cash, turned around and bought a 1986 Porsche 944 Turbo. It was beautiful and well cared for, and I drove it for a summer, garaged it for a winter, and then somehow broke its oil cooler line in the spring and trashed the transmission. It still ran, but I was concerned about it becoming a money pit, so I sold it to someone who wasn’t intimidated by the repairs it needed and picked up a 1987 944S instead.

I’ve already discussed what happened next. Clearly I was being punished for the overweening, yuppie hubris of owning a pretentious German sports car. Wait until you hear the denouement:

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my car wouldn’t start on Saturday morning. We’d had hard rains on Friday night and I didn’t realize until Sunday that my car had gotten extremely waterlogged. If I’d known there was rain in the forecast, I wouldn’t have driven the car that day at all (that’s why I have the emergency backup car, an unassuming 1996 Ford Probe GT). However, for my punishment to be complete, I had to drive the good car.

I managed to get the car started on Sunday and drive it about a block up the street, but it had no power and the floormats were sopping wet. I parked it and called my insurance company on Monday, then had it towed to my mechanic. I felt fairly optimistic that it would be a case of getting it dried out, perhaps replacing some electrical components and then cleaning it thoroughly to remove the mildew smell. Not so. My husband called yesterday to break the news to me: the car has had it.

The book value is about $5,000 if you’re being generous about it. I spent slightly more than that on repairs alone just a couple of months ago. This is not going to be pretty.

For now, I’ll drive the emergency backup car, even though it still bears the lingering smoke smell thoughtfully left behind by the previous owner. When it gives up the ghost, I may very well go and get myself another RAV4. Who am I trying to impress?

This is one of those weeks when it would be useful to have a duplicate of myself to run around getting things accomplished while I’m committed to other tasks. Work is ridiculously busy. I have three evenings of band practice with two separate bands in the next four days. I never got around to cleaning and painting my bathroom ceiling, but I can’t let Saturday’s party guests see it the way it is right now.

Maybe if I spent less time blogging and more time scrubbing…

My supreme goal is to NOT exhaust myself the day of the party doing last-minute cleaning, straightening, errands, etc. I’m going to have to make this whole thing work out in my limited spare time during the week.

I already had one stress dream about the party: It was Saturday and I’d been frantically running errands all day, to the point that the party was already in progress but I wasn’t home yet. I arrived, sans beer and food, to check on things and discovered very few people there, even though the party had started an hour ago. Clearly, people had come and gone already.

Then I woke up.

Luckily I have a game plan, albeit a tightly-scheduled one:

• Make a Costco run on my lunch break sometime this week for sodas and condiments
• Scrub ceiling on Wednesday night for Saturday morning painting (it’s latex paint, the smell shouldn’t be too bad, right?)
• Carry CD of both bands’ songs to the office for subliminal learning at work
• Pretend the weedy, overgrown patch at the top of the driveway is part of the neighbor’s yard
• Pick up kegs of beer on the way home Friday afternoon

Aren’t you glad you visited today? Where else would you get the chance to read someone’s self-indulgent, public to-do list?

I stayed overnight at my dad and stepmother’s house on Friday night and when I woke up around 7:30 a.m., I decided to head home. Nobody else was up yet, so I left myself out the back door and got in my car…which wouldn’t start.

Now I was outside, without a key, and unwilling to wake up the household to get back in. I called my husband, but I knew there was no way he’d be up at that hour. After considering my options for a few minutes (and calling my mechanic to let him know to expect the car again this week), I started thinking about a coffee shop about seven blocks away. Coffee is one of my favorite things about mornings (read: addictions), so I set off on foot to spend my last $3 on a cafe mocha.

The coffee shop was pretty busy and it was clearly a neighborhood place; everyone knew everyone else and I was the outsider. The coffee had all the flaws of a mediocre mocha: too sweet, not strong enough and not bitter enough. I drank it anyway and tried my husband about an hour after I’d placed my first call, but to no avail. I played a couple of games of solitaire on my PDA and then decided I wanted some breakfast.

Our favorite breakfast place is less than a mile further up the road, and I made it there relatively quickly. There was a wait, so I put my name in and read the paper outside until they called my name. I thought my husband might eventually wake up and listen to the phone messages, but I ended up eating by myself. By this time, I was within 3-4 miles from home, so it seemed perfectly reasonable to walk the rest of the way back.

I knew the route well, so I had no problem making my way through the neighborhoods between the restaurant and our house. I wish I’d been carrying my digital camera to catch some of the little details I noticed along the way. I saw lots of flowers in people’s yards, plenty of cats, and I noticed that when squirrels are wet, their tails appear ringed, almost like a raccoon’s tail.

I was within four blocks of home when my husband finally called me back. He sounded rather shocked that I was walking home, but I declined his offer to come and drive me home from where I was by then. I talked to my sister as I walked, and she sounded similarly surprised at my undertaking. You’d think I’d told them, “I had an accident on the thresher and dragged myself five miles on bloody stumps,” rather than, “I had a nice little five-mile stroll punctuated by coffee and breakfast.”

I think it taught me that I need to walk around in town more often. It’s amazing what you notice on foot that you never perceive while you’re driving.

Good morning and thank you to everyone who stopped by and left comments yesterday. Feel free to comment any time!

It’s been a long week of too many activities, too much coffee and too little sleep. Fortunately, I’m working on some fun projects at the office and I’m having a good time singing again.

I received a call from an old guitarist of mine from an original “alternative” type of band that broke up about 7 years ago. He said (jokingly), “VH1 called and they’re anxious to get us all back together for our long-awaited reunion concert.”

Everyone from the last incarnation of the band was planning to come to our big party anyway, so we’re going to get together this Saturday morning to dust off the cobwebs and try to remember and re-learn three or four of our songs for the following Saturday. At this point, I’m not even pretending I can memorize the lyrics to anything…I’m going to have my music stand right next to me onstage with both bands and I don’t care how that looks!

As we discussed the songs we were going to play, our catchiest one came up in conversation. R., the guitarist, said, “In my notes there’s a section in the middle described only as ‘Hungarian progression,’ and I can’t remember what I meant by that.”

Fortunately, I still have a couple of CDs of our stuff, so I’m going to burn some extra copies as a re-learning aid for all of us.

I have a big weekend ahead, beyond that band practice. I need to scrub and repaint our bathroom ceiling, do another purge of the “trash trees” invading the edges and corners of the yard, help my husband finish making the studio presentable, and finish the Shop-Vac-O-Rama I began in our basement last weekend (spiders beware!). If I have a ton of time (ha!), I might start painting the dark, 70s-era paneling in the basement a lighter color, as I’ve planned to do for quite some time. Wish me luck getting even half of this stuff done!

I learned this week that a bunch of my friends have been holding out on me. Since I started “Average Jane,” I knew that one of my friends had been inspired to start her own blog. What I didn’t know was that almost all of my friends have been blogging…secretly.

Actually, I can understand why someone would start a blog and not tell people about it for a while. If you’re not geared up for regular postings, it can seem like there’s pressure to keep up. Still, I’m happy to have a chance to read more peoples’ perspectives on their lives – especially people I know.

To all of my buddies-who-blog: thanks for “outing” yourselves and sharing your blogs with me. Don’t feel obligated to post daily on my account. To bloggers I don’t know who visit here: leave a comment when you stop by! I love discovering new sources of morning reading material.

On Monday night, my plan was to get up at 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday so I could get to work early and leave early for band practice. I had my husband set an alarm for me, but since I don’t usually use an alarm clock, my poorly-calibrated internal alarm clock managed to pick up on only the “early” part of my plan. Thus, I woke up at 5:00 a.m.

I had a wonderfully productive morning: I fed the cats, did two loads of laundry, tidied the kitchen, showered, made a protein shake, read some of my favorite blogs, and still made it to work just after 8:00 a.m.

It didn’t take long before trouble started. A project I was working on got complicated and the resolution dragged on and on, causing me to curse randomly, hit my desk, duck out for an iced mocha, and severely get on the nerves of at least two of my co-workers who were trying to help. (Sorry, guys! I’m bringing donuts as a peace offering this morning.)

The upshot was that I didn’t leave early at all. I finally left at my regular time, mouthing silent apologies to the person who was still on hold trying to work out the last problem with my project. Meanwhile, my husband was home, dancing with impatience because we needed to leave for practice. Sigh.

The day’s events started to crash down on me around the time we got to band practice. I was absolutely exhausted and it really showed in my voice. I made my way thinly and flatly through a couple of songs, then let the guys practice on their own for a while. Eventually I got my second wind and sang several songs in good order with decent strength, tone and pitch. Fortunately, everyone was incredibly patient with me.

We didn’t get home until almost 11:00 p.m., and although I was bone-tired, I couldn’t wind down right away. I finally fell asleep on the couch while my husband watched TV, and then crawled into bed around midnight.

Today I feel as though I’m coming off a hard night of partying, which seems especially unfair in that I didn’t have a single drink yesterday (no matter how appealing the idea sounded). This is usually the physical state in which viruses stop by, take a poke at my immune system, and say, “I think I can get in.” Let’s hope that doesn’t come to pass.

Today I slept until 7:30 a.m. and I’m going to do my best to take things easy (except that I have a ton of work to do). I’ve learned my lesson: I’m definitely an eight-hours-of-sleep gal. I’ll try not to forget it again.

I think every progressive company should have a policy stating that if a big thunderstorm kicks up in the morning, employees have the option of skipping work, going back to bed and sleeping through the afternoon.

Now where’s my umbrella?