Category: Daily Life

Things are slowing down a tad as the summer begins to wind down. I'm still just as busy with volunteer work as ever, but the weeks don't feel quite as hectic. Little tricks like squeezing in a quick haircut during my lunch break help make the evenings and weekends less crowded.

That's not to say that I've completely recovered from overscheduling myself. This Saturday alone has four calendar entries.

Still, I'm looking forward to my favorite season and anticipating more crock pot meals, festivals centered around apples and pumpkins, and cozy snuggles at home with the cats and dog and iPad.

I know that's still a month or so away, but I can be patient. In the meantime, I need to get with my sister to schedule a wine tasting that I impulse-purchased over the summer and I'll bet my niece would like to go horseback riding with me when I use the LivingSocial coupon I bought to do so.

Are you looking forward to fall? What's your favorite season?

I don't know what it is about me that drives me to view every open calendar square as a personal challenge, but I really need to stop filling every spare moment with activity. 

Aside from having a full-time job, here are some of the other things I do regularly:

• 3.4 mile morning walk/runs, almost daily.
• Twice monthly meetings with my community service organization (not including committee meetings and volunteer projects).
• At least two social media club events per month. I just rolled off an 18-month board term as vice president.
• Weekly cat care and cleaning for my animal rescue group (plus more sporadic work such as volunteering for events, helping with adoptions, posting things on social media or updating their website).
• Membership and participation in 3-4 book clubs.
• Keeping an eye on my dad and making sure his bills get paid.
• Dog-related activities, which would ordinarily just be walks and feeding, but lately have included weekly vet visits, twice-daily pills and ear drops, and miserable shampooings every few days.
• Cat-related activities (snuggling, petting, waving the feather wand, facilitating fetch games and dispensing treats).
• 5K events – the more gimmicky the better. So far this year I've done a yoga-themed one, the Color Run and the Glow Run. I'll probably continue doing them monthly until it gets cold outside.

Then there are those people I like—what do you call them?—oh yeah, friends and family members. It would be nice to see all of them more often. That can get to be a challenge.

I have a hard time getting around to basic household stuff. The laundry tends to sit so long it's not unusual for me to be unloading the dryer and have a happy reunion with some garment I'd almost forgotten about. We have volunteer trees as tall as the house that need to be cut down, and I've been meaning to scrub and re-seal the slate floors in our kitchen since the beginning of the year.

I always say I'm going to slow things down, but I probably won't. I'll keep going at this pace until I crash. Then I'll cancel a week's worth of commitments, take a lot of naps, get things under control at home and jump back into the fray.

Just imagine how much stuff I'll be doing once I eventually retire!

I was out of town for my niece Shay's twelfth birthday, so I decided that I would take her out to lunch and shopping so she could pick out her own gift. She stays really busy with school, soccer and lacrosse, but we managed to take advantage of an open afternoon yesterday.

Of course, it was also Mother's Day, which meant that we needed to avoid restaurants that were too mom-ish. Thus, we ended up at Winstead's for burgers, onion rings and fries. I had a limeade and she got the chocolate shake. We were both stuffed.

Winstead's is a Kansas City tradition and although we didn't visit the original 1940 location, they're all pretty much the same. The decor is 1950s reinterpreted through the color palette of the 1980s. I think Shay considered it kind of old and ratty. One of these days I should take her to one of the really funky burger joints my husband and I frequent.

After that, we moved on to shopping. In addition to getting her a birthday gift, we also needed to get her some new athletic shoes and buy a Mother's Day gift for my sister.

We started out at Pier 1, which was just a few doors down from the restaurant. I thought it seemed like a promising place to get a Mother's Day gift. We spent what seemed like an eternity looking at housewares and home decor items. Shay was enamored of a fleecy double papasan chair and tried on every style of fancy masquerade mask they had. She finally chose one small birthday gift there and we moved on to…the mall.

Yes, we went to Oak Park Mall, an enormous suburban shopping draw that has every chain store you can think of. I hadn't been there in as long as I could remember.

The instant we walked in the door, I had an asthma-related coughing fit. Some combination of candle store scents and food court smoke got to me and didn't let go until we'd moved to another wing. Did I have my rescue inhaler with me? Of course not.

We made our way through one store after another, gathering purchases: jasmine pearls tea and dark chocolate truffles for my sister, two cute tops and some reasonably-priced LA Gear sneakers for Shay, and an eye shadow for me.

We finished our shopping trip with birthday cupcakes from Cupcake A la Mode. I got the Gold Digger, described as, "A chocolate cupcake filled with gooey caramel and topped with our rich chocolate buttercream, rolled in crushed pecan pieces and drizzled with more caramel." Super messy. Oh, so good. I wish I had another one right now.

Shay had to be home by 4:00 p.m. for a lacrosse game and I got her there in plenty of time for her to give my sister her present and watch her show off her purchases. 

We had a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to another day out with my niece. No need to wait for another birthday!

There's an alleyway that I pass when I walk from my office to my favorite coffee shop that is always painted with a variety of interesting artwork. Yesterday I stopped to take this photo of a new character I hadn't noticed before.

I haven't mentioned this up to now because I hate for my blog to become a repository of my whining, but a couple of weeks ago I had the distinct displeasure of experiencing what is colloquially referred to as "throwing your back out."

In my case, that meant my sacroiliac joint popped out of place on the left side, resulting in immediate and excruciating pain. What physical feat was I attempting when it happened? Well, leaning over in the shower to wash my left foot. Later my doctor would tell me that the shower is a common site for such injuries. Who knew?

I couldn't get in to see my doctor or massage therapist until almost four days after the incident. In the meantime, I could barely sit down or stand up and it hurt to roll over in bed. I was popping Alleve every eight hours like clockwork (including in the middle of the night) and slathering myself with Biofreeze.

The doctor popped the joint back into place and worked on the overtaxed muscles affected by the injury. She described it as a sprain and told me to keep icing for at least another week. 

Later that day I had an hour of deep-tissue massage that would have been incredibly painful if I hadn't just spent the last three-and-a-half days grimacing every time I made a slight movement.

All of the therapy helped immediately, and yet my left hip still hurts and gets stiff when I sit or lie down too long. With a mid-decade birthday coming up this year, I can't help but start to feel my age when something like this happens.

However, now that the dog is well again and my hip is much better, I think the key will be resuming our walks. I'll build back some muscle and, I hope, head off any future problems.

Now excuse me while I go apply some liniment…

Photo credit: Rob Swatski

Late last summer, the central air conditioning unit for the main part of our house broke…again. We'd already been told that it was likely worn out and in need of replacement. We figured we'd deal with it this this year when it warmed up, but we never would have guessed that we'd be dealing with 87°F temperatures on the first day in April.

So our house is super hot and stuffy, even though we've had the windows open and the attic fan on. We got a quote for a new, energy efficient a/c and the installer comes tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. 

The past few weeks have been budget busters. Between car repairs for both our vehicles, vet bills and a new a/c, thousands upon thousands of dollars have fled our accounts. We're responsible for a one-household, mini economic stimulus centered in our own county.

Of course, restoring the house to livable temperatures is worth the expense, just as it was worth it to fix our cars and look after the dog's health. I just wish we hadn't had to do so many of those things all at once.

I keep writing partial blog posts and then never finishing or publishing them. In my defense, I've been incredibly busy.

Most of what's keeping me busy has been work. I've been booking my favorite small, out-of-the-way meeting room for long work sessions and it's been a great boon for my productivity. It also turns me into a hermit and causes me to work later than I'd necessarily meant to.

However, I did emerge the other day to photograph a cool-looking storm from the fourth floor of my office.

The other minor drama this week involved my car. I'd been noticing some problems with the clutch and I had a repair appointment set for this Friday morning. However, over the weekend the symptoms worsened until I could hardly get the car in or out of first gear and reverse, so I moved the appointment up to Tuesday morning.

They diagnosed a pricey problem, ordered the parts, and sent me back to work disguised as a soccer mom driving this:

On one hand, it's always kind of fun driving a new car with lots of high-tech features. On the other hand, look at the size of that thing! It has to be twice as long as my little Honda Insight. 

I got my car back yesterday for the savings-account-draining price of $700+. But at least now I can shift gears and no longer have to worry about crashing into the front wall of my garage.

One more thing worth mentioning: On Tuesday night I cooked dinner at home (for once) and decided we needed a dessert. I remembered a Chocolate Bourbon Cake recipe I'd pinned on Pinterest, so I looked it up on my phone while I was at the store and bought the one ingredient I didn't already have (which turned out to be instant coffee).

It gave me the opportunity to use some of the Lindt 90% and 99% dark chocolate I still had left from the giant basket o' chocolate I won at BlogHer last year. I also used Crown Royal instead of bourbon because the only bourbon I had on hand was a bottle of Basil Hayden's that's way too nice (and expensive) to bake with.

I could tell just from the silkiness of the batter that the cake was going to be amazing…and it was. It's a beautiful, moist, dense cake with a rich flavor that's not too sweet. I will definitely make it again and I recommend that you do the same. Next time I think I'll make some Bailey's whipped cream to go with it.

So that's been my week. How are things going with you?

Kansas City has a pretty large St. Patrick's Day parade and if I've ever been to one before, I don't remember it. Yesterday I was invited to a party at Queen of Quirky's house, which is conveniently located about a block from the parade route. We fortified ourselves with coffee and Bailey's Irish Cream, then walked up the street to watch the festivities.

It was a good parade with plenty of interesting stuff to see. I had no idea Kansas City had so many drill teams and Irish dancing schools. Yet there was only one marching band in the parade.

The weather was absolutely perfect. It was in the mid- to upper-70s all day long. Usually on St. Patrick's Day it's chilly and rainy, but this year all bets are off when it comes to normal weather.

Once we'd had all the parade we could stand (which turned out to be about an hour and a half), we adjourned to our hostess' house where we had a cookout and sat on the porch drinking beer for the rest of the afternoon. I brought pasta salad and someone made some amazing cupcakes that had chocolate Guinness cake filled with chocolate whiskey ganache and iced with Bailey's Irish Cream frosting. I may have had two of them.

I still had a volunteer shift at Petco to consider, so I kept my partying to a minimum and was one of the first to leave. It was a lot of fun, though, and a good prequel for a pub crawl I'm attending next weekend.

In the evening, my husband and I decided to stick close to home and have dinner at our favorite local barbecue joint on the back patio. We each had a Reuben and enjoyed the amazing weather.

Maybe I'll have a similar day six years from now when St. Patrick's Day next falls on Saturday. If not, at least I have some photos to remember it by!